Analysts’ predictions are often not worth the electrons they’re printed on, but CNET reports Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley has said in a research note to investors that Amazon could launch an iPad-sized 9-inch Kindle Fire by the middle of the year. Such a device could increase expected Kindle Fire sales from 12.7 million to 14.9 million units this year. He based this information on his contacts with Amazon component suppliers, which does not necessarily mean it will be accurate. This is only the latest in a number of reports that have suggested a 9-inch Fire could launch sometime this year,...

From an email I received this afternoon from Bluefire. Several months ago we released Bluefire Reader for Android. While the app is available in the Amazon App Store for Android, it’s not available in the Kindle Fire App Store. Amazon has blocked most third-party ebook apps. We think that’s a shame and wanted to make Bluefire Reader available for you to download to your Kindle Fire. The instructions below guide you through the steps for installing Bluefire Reader for Android on your Kindle Fire. Note that you should open this page in the browser...

A new iOS and Android app for all poetry lovers from the Columbia University Press. The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry is a leading web and print resource for anyone with an interest in the world of poetry. The Granger’s World of Poetry app delivers the Granger’s Poem of the Day and Daily Trivia Question, for people who enjoy staying in touch with their poetic nature. The Granger’s Poem of the Day app is a product of Columbia University Press. Download the App (Free to Download and Use) Direct to Android Market Direct to iTunes App Store [Via INFOdocket]...

Changewave Research has just released a new report on the Kindle Fire. From the press release: Survey of New Kindle Fire Owners Since the mid-November launch of the Kindle Fire, consumer demand for the tablet has been nothing less than explosive. In the January survey 6% of respondents reported they own a Kindle Fire – double the percentage of a month ago. ChangeWave asked 254 new Kindle Fire owners a series of questions regarding their overall satisfaction and key likes and dislikes, to gauge their reaction to the new tablet device. Customer Satisfaction. When asked how satisfied they are...

Wow, Notion Ink is still around. After a promising buildup for its “Adam” Pixel Qi-display Android tablet, followed by lackluster reviews of the finished product, the company kind of faded into the background. Notion Ink is moving forward with plans for an Adam 2, powered by a TI OMAP processor rather than NVidia’s Tegra. The company feels it will be able to get more performance out of an Omap than it could a Tegra. On Notion Ink’s “Designing Adam 2” blog, Rohan Shravan promises: Unlike last time where we banked on Tegra without possibly...

Check out Woot! This is a great price for a full-sized tablet - if you are willing to tackle webOS.  It's refurbished.  HP has announced that webOS will be made open source later this year, so this might be a good bet for the more technically inclined among us....

From Andrys Basten's A Kindle World Blog: Now we can add a 16 to 32 gig pocket-sized drive to the Kindle Fire -- and soon, Kingston Digital says, a 64GB drive (price not known yet).  The drive can be carried in your pocket. Android Mag's Pallavi had one of the several announcements of the availability of Kingston's WiDrive a few days ago, but the Kindle Fire app was not available in the Amazon AppStore.  It is now. I just downloaded it. Pallavi writes: ' It utilizes "Flash-based technology to store data from USB-compatible PCs." ...

There are other 7” Android tablets out there than the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. And as if to prove it, Geeks.com has put three of them on sale for under $100 today. The RPAD is $88.99 new, the Pandigital Novel is $98.99 refurbished (available in dark purple and red colors), and the Coby Kyros is $99.99 refurbished (“almost gone”). After that, the price jumps up to $249.99 for a couple of refurbished flavors of Galaxy Tab. Further research indicates that the RPAD is only $10 off what you could get it for on Amazon and has gotten two one-star...

From the Aldiko blog.  Congratulations! 5-million download is a pretty big number for a single app on a single mobile platform. Last December, thanks to all Aldikoans around the world, the Aldiko Book Reader app free version exceeded 5 million downloads. This is a big milestone for us. The Aldiko Book Reader app continues to be users’ eBook app of choice when it comes to reading on Android devices. We would also like to take the opportunity to thank all aldikoans for their support. We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012. ...

Over the last few days, reports and pictures have surfaced showcasing the new OLPC XO-3 tablet that will be debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The 8-inch tablet will cost under $100 for its target market. In terms of what’s under the hood, The Verge reports: In terms of raw specs, the XO 3.0 has an 8-inch, 1024 x 768-resolution PixelQi display, which can be read indoors and out, a Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, 512MB of RAM, and will be configurable with either Android or Sugar operating systems. Sugar...

Now this is a tablet I was very, very interested in - at least until I read the review.  The form factor makes for extreme portability, which most tablets lack.  Here's a snippet: Despite a premium price tag that pits it against the iPad, it doesn't follow up with a commensurate user experience. Screen transitions are sluggish, and that bezel (perhaps unsurprisingly) often hinders any interactions between the screens. Priced at £500 ($780), the portability of the device may find some fans, but your money would be better spent on either a smartphone with similar screen real estate, or sacrificing that...

From Andrys Basten's A Kindle World Blog comes a useful tip: In the blog article with many general tips on using the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire,  I went into detail on dealing with web pages or with PDFs in which you can see the full page but which are usually unreadable in that format or screen width on a smaller screen than we use with considerably larger computer screens. I've found that many news-site reviewers still don't know about a valuable Android feature that is crucial to enjoyment of web pages on small devices (this applies to Android smartphones also), and of...