Amazon, Android | featured news

Amazon says buyers of its new Kindle Fire HD tablet will get the option to turn off the advertisements that appear on its standby screen for $15. The online retailer showed off the tablet last week, and said there would be no option to turn off the ads. That was a departure from Amazon's previous policies. It has shipped Kindle e-readers with "Special Offers" ads on the standby screen, but users could pay to have them turned off.

The trio of Kindle e-readers took the three top places on Amazon’s best sellers on their site. In fact, over one million Kindles have been sold per week for the month of December. Every country that has an Amazon site showed the Kindle Fire as their top-selling product.

Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon's servers and play them via the web or Android.

Amazon just revealed its own specially curated version of the Android Marketplace, but has chosen to label it the "Appstore."

Does the world have room for another App Store? We'll find out soon. Reportedly, Amazon is planning to launch their very own app store for Android-based devices. Amazon already sells eBook content through the Kindle, and while a few games have also emerged for Kindle, having a dedicated app store that would be available...