Greg Sterling thinks Amazon has got Google itchy: "Pricing will be the strategic decision Google has to make with its branded (“Chome” or “Nexus”?) tablet. It won’t be able to stem the tide of Amazon Kindle Fire sales without matching or beating its price. If it declines to offer a 7″ tablet and only goes after the 10″ category, it could have success with a “good enough” tablet priced aggressively ($300 or below). Would Google equally be willing to break even or take a modest loss to ensure tablet sales? My guess is that it would.<br />"Google has seemingly lost confidence in its OEM partners’ capacity to make and sell tablets and is now taking the matter into its own hands. Yet by doing so it also risks alienating those same Android smartphone partners by bringing out a lower-priced Google-branded device."

"Amazon just announced that it sold more than a million Kindle devices per week throughout December — that includes the Kindle, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Fire tablet."

Here's a suggestion: if Amazon had sold more than 5m Kindles, it would have said so, because that's such a solid, impressive number, and would imply that it had sold more than 1.25m per week. (Six million would have been 1.5m per week - even more noteworthy.)

So our suggestion is that it sold between 4m and 5m Kindles (of all flavours) in the period.

"I thought of two other proxies for sales that might help us get closer to a real number.

"I looked at the number of customer reviews made for each of the various Kindles since December 1. Assuming that customers of each product are equally likely to write a review this should give a reasonable estimation for relative sales volumes.
I did a search on TwitPic for “New Kindle” and went through the recent pictures tallying up the relative counts of the various models. My assumption here is that people would share pictures of their new devices with roughly equal measure. Since the devices are physically so different, it was easy to distinguish their purchases."

Or might that overestimate Kindle Fire sales, since you'd be more likely to tweet or review a brand new piece of just-released kit than something that has been around for a while?

"Amazon.com today announced that Kindle devices remain the hottest products this holiday season – for the third week in a row, customers are purchasing well over 1 million Kindle devices per week, and Kindle Fire remains the #1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since its introduction 11 weeks ago. To learn more about the all-new Kindle family – the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G and the $199 Kindle Fire – visit www.amazon.com/kindle.

“Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched – it’s the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we’ve already sold millions of units, and we’re building millions more to meet the high demand. In fact, demand is accelerating – Kindle Fire sales increased week over week for each of the past three weeks."

Amazon has never specified Kindle sales before. It hasn't really here either, but it's a lot more than it has ever said previously.

"iFixit, bless their hearts, have taken a Kindle Fire to pieces, though as it turns out, there aren’t too many pieces to begin with. The battery is one huge unit, and all the processing and I/O occurs on a single PCB at the bottom of the device.

"Those expecting a carbon copy of the Playbook both outside and in will be disappointed: the layout, batteries, PCB, and all the components are different, making the form factor more or less the only real similarity between the two devices."

They share a processor. Basically, tablets are now a battery, screen, and a circuit board.

"The Fire is by no means a dumb device. It’s just that it’s more of a “hall pass” than a real computer. I can research, write, and file a 2,000 word article on my iPad, complete with photos imported from my SLR. The most ambitious thing I could accomplish with the Fire would be to receive a Word file attached to an email from my editor, make some cuts and changes, and then email it back.

"I’m sure that the Kindle Fire team sleeps soundly, regardless. Through all of the Fire’s features and the ways that the device presents itself, Amazon clearly wants to define the Fire as a content device with tablet-ish bonus features available to users who wish to seek those functions out."

Generally, he's positive about it; his point though is that it's not an iPad or a personal computer. Compare and contrast...

"It was only a couple of months ago that I was blogging about the online battle between the iPad and Kindle. Back in August, iPad dominated the UK search market, with twice as much search volume as the Kindle. Amazon’s announcement last week of a new backlit tablet to challenge the iPad, called the Kindle Fire, has turned the market on its head."

People really, really want to know about Kindle Fire. This isn't actually good news for Google, but it's great news for Amazon.

Probably the best title for the COTD ever. Now you'll have to click through to understand it.

"At first, I thought that Amazon’s rationale might be similar to the one Google takes on the issue of infringing or objectionable YouTube content: given that 48-hours’-worth of video is being uploaded every minute, it simply isn’t feasible to pre-scan stuff before it’s published. But Google will take it down on receipt of a complaint. That won’t get Amazon off the Kindlespam hook for two reasons: (1) Compared with video, pre-scanning of text is perfectly feasible, and computationally not that difficult; Amazon could easily do it. (2) Detection of infringing content in Kindlespam by rights holders is very difficult for the reasons outlined earlier, so while a take-down-upon-complaint policy is perfectly feasible, complaints will be much less frequent than they are on YouTube.<br />
"So we’re left with a puzzle. Pre-scanning for crap, spam and infringing content in Kindlespam is perfectly feasible — and indeed only Amazon can do it effectively. Yet it does not do it. Why?"

"Because we've come to take printed books for granted, we tend to overlook their enormous flexibility as reading instruments. It's easy to flip through the pages of a physical book, forward and backward. It's easy to jump quickly between widely separated sections, marking your place with your thumb or a stray bit of paper or even a hair plucked from your head (yes, I believe I've done that). You can write anywhere and in any form on any page of a book, using pen or pencil or highlighter or the tip of a burnt match (ditto). You can dog-ear pages or fold them in half or rip them out. You can keep many different books open simultaneously, dipping in and out of them to gather related information. And when you just want to read, the tranquility of a printed book provides a natural shield against distraction."<br />
<br />
Wonder if there will be an ebook backlash in a couple of years?

The Kindle, the Nook - they're the equivalent of those clunky phones that just make calls and send texts. It's an argument.