Gadgets, Kindle Fire | featured news

Apple Inc's "iPad mini" will attract new customers but the higher-than-expected price will come as a relief to low-cost tablets such as Amazon.com Inc's Kindle, analysts said, in a muted reaction to the new tablet.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is phasing out the sale of Amazon.com's Kindle Fire tablet and Kindle e-readers, the second major retailer to stop offering the items in six months... Retailers are trying to fight a growing practice called "showrooming." That's when shoppers, armed with smartphones, browse products in physical stores and then shop online for a better price.

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.

Amazon's new Kindle Fire HD boasts a much more vibrant screen than the original tablet that came out about a year ago. That makes buying movies and TV shows to watch on the device a lot more appealing....

Amazon.com Inc. is expected to unveil a new Kindle Fire on Thursday as it seeks to take a bigger bite of the tablet computer market and boost sales of digital goods like e-books and movies.

Amazon.com quenched the Kindle Fire on Thursday, saying its first tablet computer is now "sold out." The Internet retailer has a major press conference scheduled for next Thursday in Santa Monica, California. It's widely expected to reveal a new model of the Fire there, so the announcement that the first model is "sold out" suggests that Amazon halted production a while ago to retool for a new model.

Google will sell a small tablet computer bearing its brand in a challenge to Amazon's Kindle Fire. The Nexus 7 is designed specifically for Google Play, the online store that sells movies, music, books, apps and other content - the things Amazon.com Inc. also sells for its tablet computer.

Here's an interesting idea: that Barnes and should consider splitting the company. Separate the physical bookstores from the virtual business of the Nook and allow that digital business the room and capital to compete with Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle?

The Kindle Fire turned out to be a popular device largely because of its comparatively low price tag. it was the first sub-$200 tablet (by a buck) that didn't feel like a $25 device you'd expect to find in a Fisher Price catalog, and as a result, Amazon closed out the fourth quarter of 2011 with a 14 percent share of the global tablet market,...

With the rumblings from Amazon about the early success of its new Kindle Fire over the holiday season, the company’s disappointing fourth quarter results came as a surprise. More surprising was Amazon’s silence regarding total Kindle Fire sales for the quarter. During the earnings call, Amazon’s executive team deferred questions about the device to the press release, which simply regurgitated sales data from December.