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Monday, October 10, 2011

5 Reasons the Amazon Kindle Beats the iPad

Gadgets - SCITECH

Published October 09, 2011

| FoxNews.com

The Kindle Fire is burning up the charts.

Purported pre-sales of the newly announced Kindle Fire by Amazon suggest the tablet is on track to outsell the iPad in first-month sales. If accurate, that’s big -- really big. So far, competing brands have done nothing to rival Apple’s splash nor dominance of the growing tablet market. The Fire is the first real competitor.

Apple iPad sales are as brisk as ever, of course, but there’s plenty of reason for the excitement surrounding the all-new, color screen, touch-enabled Kindle Fire. To borrow an Apple word, it’s different. But it’s also similar enough to the iPad that a lot of consumers might view it as a worthy alternative -- indeed, something better.

1. Eye-popping affordability. At $199, the Kindle Fire sells for less than half the price of the iPad, which starts at $500. So for every entry-level iPad bought and sold, you could buy two and a half Fires. That alone is turning heads, especially since the previously released and uninspired iPad clones have tried to charge as much as Apple for a much less desired product.

2. A lot more content. Content is king. And iPad may be king of the apps, but Kindle Fire bests it considerably by volume of content. The Fire will have immediate access to the 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books already available on Amazon’s easy-to-browse virtual shelves.

Apple doesn't cite how many TV shows or songs are available, but the number appears to be far less in annecdotal searches.

Want to rent instead of buy? There’s an app ... er, a solution for that, too: 10,000 movies and TV shows can be streamed instantly. Those numbers are huge, and growing everyday.

3. Free storage. If you want to take all your content with you, the entry-level iPad and its puny 16 gig storage drive leaves a lot to be desired. You can buy more, but it’ll cost you. Which is why the Fire’s sales pitch -- free cloud storage for all your Amazon content -- is so enticing, especially since Amazon is already the no. 1 digital bookstore, the no. 2 mp3 store (behind Apple), and high on the list in other categories.

For content you don't buy from Amazon, there are about 6 gigs of free space on the Fire to do with as you please.

4. Democratized apps. One of the biggest knocks on the Apple AppStore is that it’s a closed system—if Apple doesn’t like your stuff, no app for you. One of the biggest knocks on the Google Android software powering nearly every other tablet out there is that it's too open—you’re required to sift through a lot of junk to get to the goods.

The Kindle Fire hopes to bridge that gap with the Amazon Appstore, which remains open like Android, but only makes available the very best and most popular apps from the open market. The result: More free apps without the hassle, the best of both worlds approach.

5. Easier to hold. The 10-inch iPad is a lot of fun, but hard to handle with one hand due to its weight and size. The 6-inch Kindle reader, on the other hand, is a lot easier to hold. With only one hand, you can hold it for several hours without fatigue. The new 7-inch Kindle Fire promises the same: capable of being held with one hand, lighter than the iPad, and a lot more portable.

All of those pros don’t come without sacrifices, however. The Fire’s screen is 3” smaller than the iPad, which might not make it as ideal a device for watching movies or playing HD games (that’s to be seen, though). Furthermore, the Fire lacks a lens and microphone, so it won’t be able to snap photos, shoot video, or accept video calls.

But for $300 less, those are things I bet a lot of people can live without.

The Kindle Fire goes on sale Nov. 15 for $199.

About the author: Blake Snow is a freelance writer, media consultant, and proud owner of both the iPad and 3G Kindle. He lives in Utah with his family. Contact information and clippings can be found on his website: blakesnow.com

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Hands On With the Apple iPhone 4S

By Dan Costa
October 5, 2011 08:00am EST PCMAG.com

The Apple iPhone 4S won't be available until Oct. 14, but PCMag got some hands-on time with it shortly after it was announced Tuesday. Cosmetically, the iPhone 4S looks exactly like last year's iPhone 4, but as Tim Cook boasted, "Inside it is all new."

Apple's new smartphone has a dual-core A5 CPU, an 8-megapixel still camera, a 1080p video camera, and of course, iOS 5. What does all this mean to the average user? We will have to get it into PC Labs before we issue a judgment, but in the short time I spent with the iPhone 4S, it seems like an improved version of an already very solid smartphone.

Hold the iPhone 4S in your hand and it is impossible to tell it apart from the iPhone 4. Apple would not let me shoot still photos or video of the device, so you'll have to take my word on this. I asked five different Apple representatives and none of them could point out a single difference between the phones. That isn't a bad thing; I rather like the iPhone 4's industrial, almost steampunk design.

I point it out only to explain that if you want to show off the fact you have an iPhone 4S, you'll have to do it verbally or keep the phone the box it came in. The models are identical, at least on the outside.

In my short time with the iPhone 4S, I tried to tax the new A5 CPU, the same processor that is used in the iPad 2 tablet. The stunning Infinity Blade 2 game that was shown in the demonstration wasn't loaded on my unit, but it did have Real Racing 2. The game was fluid and had richly detailed backgrounds, but to be honest, there is only so much detail you can fit on a 3.5-inch screen. I'd really like to see what it looks like when you use AirPlay to stream the game on a WiFi-connected HDTV. Then we'll see what the iPhone 4S can really do. Even so, it is more than a match for the average Android phone and should continue to give Sony and Nintendo nightmares.

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If I said that I had tested the new iPhone's camera in any meaningful way, PCMag Camera Analyst Jim Fisher would embarrass me for my arrogance and then promptly quit. Let's just say I tried the camera and it was pretty impressive to my eyes. Although it looks exactly the same as the camera on the iPhone 4, it has six separate lenses. Those lenses are probably more important than the sensor bump from 5 megapixels to 8 megapixels, but the extra pixels don't hurt either. Perhaps most significantly, the camera's maximum aperture is now f2.4, which is enough to let in a serious amount of light. Suffice to say, when I looked at iPhone 4S photos side-by-side with those taken with the iPhone 4, I could see the difference in quality.

The iPhone 4S camera is also a lot speedier than many of the phone cameras I have used. First, Apple tweaked the OS so you can open the camera in just two clicks and be ready to shoot in seconds. After that first shot, I was able to shoot multiple photos in such quick succession that it made my Galaxy S feel like a Polaroid.

Likewise, shooting video at 1080p is a huge deal. You can't judge the quality by playing it back on a tiny smartphone screen, but if the iPhone is going to replace both the compact camera and the video camera, it has to be able to shoot video that will look good on an HDTV. We will know for sure when we get the iPhone 4S into the lab and connect to an HDTV, but the video I shot looked great.

The most notable difference with the iPhone 4S is that it runs iOS 5. We have a lot of stories on iOS 5, so I won't go into too many details on the next version of Apple's mobile operating system. In addition to a host of small improvements, the breakthrough feature here is really the inclusion of Siri. We first reviewed Siri's voice recognition assistant in 2010, before it was snapped up by Apple. Now Siri is so integrated into iOS 5 that it doesn't even have a separate icon, it is poised to be the primary navigation tool for the device.

The idea behind Siri is very simple. Tell your phone what you want using your natural voice in everyday language. Siri will understand you and complete the task. When I asked, "What's the weather like today?" Siri gave me the day's forecast and read it aloud to me. It used the GPS to determine my location. When I asked, "What are the great Italian restaurants near me?" Siri delivered a list of five of them ranked by their ratings on Yelp. With your contacts and calendar loaded in the phone, Siri can call contacts and make appointments. To be fair, Siri doesn't always work. When I asked, "What's the distance between here and New York City?" Siri gave me gibberish. Even so, the software does a lot. In my short time with it, it was pretty impressive.

All and all, the iPhone 4S struck me as a solid upgrade, although arguably an incremental improvement over the previous version. As part of the presentation, Apple executives explained that they would be able to do real-time hand-offs between the two antennas that would improve call quality and double downloads speeds. Double?!? No doubt these were efforts to make up for the fact that the iPhone 4S does not support 4G, at least not by most definitions.

Of course, if Apple can deliver a phone with eight hours of talk time, a host of cutting-edge features, and download speeds that are similar to 4G, if not technically 4G, this phone's prospects are pretty good. For answers to those questions, of course, we will need to do a full review.