Amazon used to be able to sell the Kindle based on its readability in sunlight. That’s a fair comparison to make and the old advertising featured little more than people being happy reading. To wit:

But the commercial above takes a different tack. The old “it works in the sun” line is still is still in there, but I assure you that Amazon is most interested in getting the more expensive and potentially more lucrative Kindle Fires out the door. What do they do? They suggest that the kids can hang out in the shade with their Fires while mom schools an old fool and his iPad. And all three of those devices still cost less than an iPad (or similarly outfitted tablet). Sneaky, sneaky, Amazon.

In fairness, two Fires and a standard Kindle are still cheaper than an iPad, but I suspect the kiddos in that Daiquiri-stained sloth tent would still rather watch videos and play games on a more capable device. But this is Amazon’s version of price-conscious Club Med, and who are we to judge?

According to GoodEReader, Amazon is planning to open a retail store in Seattle this year where they will sell Amazon-exclusive books and, more importantly, Kindles of all kinds. While this looks to be more of a pop-up retail presence than a fully-fledged store, if I were in publishing I’d be circling the wagons right now.

To be fair, Amazon’s own publishing offerings are pretty wonky so far. There haven’t been many runaway successes coming out of the house although Seth Godin and Tim Ferris will soon be bringing their own brand of publishing success and there are some interesting cross-cultural titles coming out. But that’s not why publishing has to worry.

The Kindle was Amazon incarnate, a way for Amazon to bring its online presence into the real world. A physical Kindle store – one that exists in a mall or popular area, even for a short period – is like the third coming. It’s basically a chance for Amazon to grab every else they have missed during the initial run up in Kindle popularity. We’re talking older folks, luddites, grumps, and folks who claim that “reading it in paper” is better. To have them walk up to a display of working Kindles, newly minted and displaying the latest Stephen King book, is the only way Amazon will convince them that going digital is the only way to go.

This will also encourage the movement from the agent-publisher-distributor model of book publishing into a direct to consumer model that Amazon will spearhead. By showing potential authors that they can get their books bound in handsome Kindle editions, they’ll be more likely to go that route instead of pounding fruitlessly against the gates of big publishing. It’s obviously a no-brainer to many of us, but old paradigms die hard.

As I said before, the Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse. However, rather than the wary hold-outs bringing in Amazon’s market by buying the fire, Amazon will bring the Trojans to their own branded stores.

The store will appear in Settle in the next few months and presumably be the first of a nation-wide roll-out. I suspect it will be a bit of a loss for Amazon but hopefully it will convert the last hold-outs to the benefits of ereading.

When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in 1998, he did something unusual. For the first time in any presentation he had ever given, he ended with a slide reading, “Oh, and one more thing…” This phrase would of course enter the Apple lexicon in the subsequent years. But what was it that was hidden behind this first “one more thing”?

“Think Profit.”

You see, Jobs had just been named interim CEO in September 1997 after successfully pushing out the man who brought him (back) in, Gil Amelio. And he had good reason to do that: under Amelio, Apple had lost $1.04 billion in the prior year and was less than ninety days from being completely broke. Just a few months later, as he announced on stage, Jobs had the company back in black: a $45 million profit — the first profit the company had seen in more than two years.

Jobs’ move wasn’t magic. He slashed thousands of jobs and killed off dozens of products. Walter Isaacson details this time in his Steve Jobs’ biography. One part in particular stuck out to me.

In 1997 Apple was selling StyleWriter color printers that were basically a version of the Hewlett Packard DeskJet. HP made most of its money by selling ink cartridges. “I don’t understand,” Jobs said at the product review meeting. “You’re going to ship a million and not make money on these? This is nuts.”

I was thinking about this in relation to Amazon’s recent earnings. The company posted a record $17.4 billion in revenue in Q4 2011, but from all those sales, they were only able to squeeze $177 million in profit. Compare this to Apple’s most recent quarter in which they posted a record $46.33 billion in revenue and, more importantly, a record $13.06 billion in profit. The margin difference could not be any more stark.

Obviously, the first thing everyone jumps to is to say that Amazon and Apple are in two different types of businesses. Amazon is a retailer while Apple sells hardware. But the line is increasingly blurring between the two companies. Amazon now sells a number of hardware products thanks to its Kindle line. Apple, meanwhile, sells plenty of content via iTunes.

The thing is, even with Amazon entering the hardware game, they’re not making the kind of money that Apple is. In fact, with the new Kindle Fire tablet, it’s believed that they’re losing a small amount of money on each one sold. “This is nuts,” you could imagine Steve Jobs saying once again.

But is it nuts?

Amazon clearly views products like the Kindle Fire as a loss-leader to keep customers happy and keep them shopping for more content. Apple’s model is the exact opposite. Content sales are a loss-leader to keep customers happy and keep them buying new hardware.

At least for now, one model is working, one isn’t. Not only did Amazon only make $177 million on sales of $17.4 billion last quarter, they’re warning that they could actually lose money this quarter. They have enough money in the bank to sustain this for sometime, but at some point, they’re going to have to get back in the black in a meaningful way. And if they keep selling hardware, investors are going to look at their margins compared to Apple’s and wonder what the hell is going on?

Amazon has said time and time again over the years that they’re perfectly happy to live in the low-margin space. But these most recent margins are likely getting too thin for comfort. The Q4 profit numbers are 58 percent lower than they were a year earlier. Presumably, they have a plan that justifies these losses for the sake of the bigger picture. But again, it’s not unreasonable to think that this bigger picture will eventually pit Amazon against Apple directly.

Amazon may find itself in a race to get to Walmart-size revenues before there’s true competition in the space. Last quarter, Walmart pulled in $109.5 billion in revenue, which led to $3.3 billion in profit. As with Amazon, the margins are awful, but at that scale, it doesn’t matter. Walmart’s quarterly revenue more than doubled Apple’s which resulted in profit less than a quarter of what Apple saw — but at the end of the day, Walmart still walked away with over $3 billion in their pockets. That’s all that matters.

As their dance with the dreaded red line proves, Amazon isn’t anywhere close to operating the way Walmart does yet. In fact, Amazon’s margins are so slim that Facebook, which just filed to go public today, recorded nearly double the profit of Amazon last year ($1 billion versus $631 million). That’s pretty crazy when you think about it.

Jobs’ decision to exit Apple from the printer business 15 years ago proved to be a smart move. Of course, had Apple been selling ink — which has ridiculously high margins — it may have been a tougher call. Amazon’s problem is that the “printers” they’re selling have crappy margins and the “ink” they’re selling has crappy margins. It’s starting to sound a little nuts.

For people who have been doing just one thing for a long, long time, it’s amazing how many content distributors get things so catastrophically wrong.

These last few weeks brought us quite a few unique situations, including the launch of Apple’s iBook Author software as well as a number of announcements from the studios to withhold streaming rights for Netflix viewers. Cory Doctorow points to a particularly delightful bit of DRM making the rounds in publishing right now, something that will be familiar iTunes users who found their real names embedded in music files a while back.

In a column at Publishers Weekly, he writes:

If there is anything that exemplifies the delusional nature in some publishing boardrooms today, however, it is the phrase “social DRM.” For those unfamiliar with the term, social DRM is another name for an unencrypted e-book that has the purchaser’s name (and often contact information) inserted in it, via some kind of digital watermarking. The idea is that e-book customers will be reluctant to share their e-books around if they know that their name and information will travel with the books, either because they don’t want to be shamed for being patient zero in a widespread epidemic of unauthorized copying, or out of fear of legal reprisals from publishers should a copy with their name on it show up on the Pirate Bay.

The delusion of publishers isn’t in their belief that social DRM will keep people from sharing. The real delusion lies in the use of “social DRM” in connection with the marketing and sale of e-books. Recently, I discovered some publishers actually advertising their use of social DRM.

Social DRM and release speed-bumps are, in the end, as laughable as SOPA/PIPA, CSS, Kindle encryption, and all of the DRMs and “road blocks” that came before them. The only real DRM – digital rights management, in its purest sense – is a reasonably-priced product sold everywhere in the the world quickly, easily, and, in the case of media like books and shows, the ability to be shared. Amazon and B&N clearly know this, and the gaming industry is learning. Music distributors have had this truth foisted upon them and they seem to be accepting it – with some hiccups – quite gamely. However, books and movies are still fighting the endless fight, attempting to make Amazon, Netflix, and other distributors bow to their will just as, once upon a time, book sellers and movie theaters went along with their harebrained schemes just to stay in business.

Piracy is a huge problem, but it’s a problem that’s solved through distribution, not DRM. As Paul Carr notes, “people who illegally copy books on a large scale, for personal profit, should be buried up to their necks in sand until ants eat their lungs from the inside.” End of story and replace books with anything created by a person who loves to make art.

The books/discs and mortar stores worked because in any town anywhere in the world, a kid could walk down to the local Buzzard’s Nest or B. Dalton or Barnes & Noble and plunk down $12.95 for a cassette of Duran Duran. These days, that same kid can get the cassette for nothing. The key, then, is to supplant that model through fair and easy pricing world-wide, ensuring less “effusive” but similar revenue streams. If I can buy a bestseller with one click on the Kindle, I’m far less likely to steal it.

To be clear, this is a 36-year-old’s view of the landscape. There are plenty of folks for whom the prospect of spending $12.95 or $10 or even $0.99 on an album is not feasible. But you don’t sell to those folks. You sell to your customers and hope the rest of the world becomes potential customers.

This is the tipping point for DRM. We are at a stage where our devices are so divorced from the actual plumbing of content distribution that to download an MP3 or MP4 will soon be as alien to coming generations as sliding a punch card through an IBM reader. You could argue that this is already true in that Kindle and iPhone owners can get music and books instantly, without understanding the format, the methodology, or networking. Whispernet, for example, is a perfect book distribution system. It works anywhere, it works with one click, and it is so ridiculously easy that you forget you’re spending money.

As much as free software folks bemoan the loss of the general purpose computer, in a few years our experience in consuming content will be mediated beyond recognition. Distributors and artists can do it the right way – at a fair price that will ensure folks will actually pay for content – or the wrong way by putzing around with release dates, ridiculous pricing differentials in different markets, and consistent dedication to the false church of DRM.

Right now, most e-books look an awful lot like their print counterparts, but startups like just-launched Coliloquy want to change that.

In the past few months, other companies including Findings, Readmill, and Subtext have experimented with adding annotations and other social features to e-books. Coliloquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford said she wants to go further. What if, for example, you could tell Twilight author Stephenie Meyer that Edward is a sap, and Bella should choose Jacob instead?

“If you take away all the constraints of traditional publishing, would [writers] tell stories in a different way?” Rutherford said. “We want to really reimagine how authors think about it.”

In practice, that means working with authors to add interactivity and personalization, but not going overboard. Rutherford said she doesn’t want the technology to be a gimmick — the books should be interactive, but they’re not going to be as game-like as of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, and underneath it all there has to be a good story.

The company has signed up Heidi R. Kling (author of the forthcoming young adult romance Sea), Kira Snyder (whose TV credits include Alphas and Eureka), Liz Maverick (What a Girl Wants), and Tawna Fenske (Making Waves) as its launch partners, and they’re all starting romance series written specifically for Coliloquy. They can create multiple viewpoints for a single scene, or multiple plot paths through each book. They can poll their readers to decide the outcome of future volumes, i.e., which heartthrob the heroine will end up with. And they can reward readers for participating with extra content.

The company came out of the Kindle Developer Program for Active Content, and for now Rutherford said it’s focusing on Kindle devices. The titles will be priced similarly to other e-books, Rutherford said, though there will eventually be options to subscribe to an entire series too.

The company’s founders both come from a tech background—Rutherford was president of virtual economy startup Twofish and an advisor to social media and gaming companies through Elodie Partners, while her co-founder Waynn Lue was a founder of social media company Unwrap. (Years ago, he also worked with me at The Stanford Daily.)

But what about, say, iPad owners who prefer science fiction to romance? Rutherford said the company plans to add new genres and is also considering new devices.

Amazon has stopped pretending that a group of e-reading apps it allowed onto its Android Appstore weren’t available on the Kindle Fire. For whatever reason, the company was effectively hiding e-reading apps from companies like Wattpad, Kobo and Bluefire, even though they worked perfectly fine on the low-cost tablet computer.

Confused about why its app didn’t appear for users on the Kindle Fire, which is proving to be quite a sought-after device, Wattpad engaged in conversations with some folks over at Amazon, which apparently led to a necessary change in policy for all makers of mobile e-reading apps.

It’s unclear when Amazon started showing e-reading apps from rivals (including Wattpad’s) on Kindle Fire, exactly, but it seems they started appearing in listings sometime yesterday afternoon. Possibly, this was part of the Kindle Fire update that was delivered earlier this week.

Either way, this is good news for Wattpad, Kobo and other e-reading app developers, who no longer have to educate people on how to sideload their applications on the Kindle Fire.

Update: Wattpad’s Amy Martin points out to me that, while she’s certain that there were multiple e-reading apps in the listings yesterday evening, right now it’s back to Wattpad only. We’re trying to find out what’s up with that.

Last week, The Verge reported that Amazon redirected everyone trying to visit the Android Market website of direct app market.android.com links to its own Appstore.

However, GigaOm’s Kevin C. Tofel reported yesterday that the browsing block is no more.

I don’t consider Amazon to be an evil corporation, but both the hiding of competing e-reader apps and the browser redirection on the Kindle Fire were business practices bordering on downright shady. It is, however, worth noting that Amazon seems to be paying close attention to all feedback and prone to fixing what needs to be fixed rapidly.

Amazon has updated the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad, adding some basic improvements to the standard assortment of reader functions. These include the addition of “print replica” textbooks so students can follow along with the paper copy in class as well as improved PDF support and a personal document system that lets you send files to an Amazon address for conversion.

They’ve also improved the magazine interface for easy downloads and storage. You can also sideload PDFs for reading on the go.

As if that weren’t enough, Conan O’Brien brings us someone who may or may not be Jeff Bezos addressing the many complaints folks have had regarding the Kindle Fire, including the poorly-place on/off button and its as-of-yet undiscovered tendency to catch fire.

You probably know that not all LCDs are created equal: at a given size, you can have different resolutions, lighting methods, and display-driving technologies. Apple has led the way in this regard, generally shelling out in its products for the best options available, while cheaper brands tend to take a bit off the price tag by going with a cheaper or smaller display. That’s certainly the case with the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, both of which are aimed at a lower price point and must make sacrifices to reach it.

But an examination by DisplayMate indicates that Amazon might have cut corners just a little too much, or perhaps rushed the Fire to market without too much thought about image quality.

It’s nothing truly problematic, it should be said right away, and DisplayMate notes that it’s still a good display, but it has a couple serious problems that, objectively speaking, put it on a lower tier than the competition.

The “anti-reflective treatment” on the Fire appears to have backfired, as the display had the highest reflectance of any tablet they’d tested. Reflected ambient light (as in a bright room) and directed light (as from overhead lights) was significantly higher than the iPad, and more than twice as high as the Nooks, which by the by had extremely low reflectance, making it good for reading in diverse lighting situations. The reflectance also caused a reduction in effective contrast, which is bad news for reading print.

The Fire also uses an outdated gallery app that doesn’t use the full 24 bits of color depth of which the display is capable, resulting in banding and apparently a washed-out look that really has no place on a premium device.

The second problem may be fixed in a software update (it’s a bit like the problem Nexus Ones had back in the day), but the poor coating or material that’s resulting in the high reflectance likely isn’t going anywhere (unless this was an early batch problem). In many ways the Fire is the equal of the Nook and the iPad 2 displays, but all other things being equal, it’s just not as good. If possible, do a visual comparison in person to see if the difference is significant to you, and of course if you find the display is not up to your standards, you should feel perfectly justified in returning it. But if it looks good to you, it looks good, and there’s no point getting caught up in a few percentage points of difference here and there.

Note: the article referenced is not a review of the tablets themselves, only of the performance of their displays. And the iPad, Kindle, and Nook displays are certainly comparable, being the same class of relatively high quality IPS LCD, with similar costs and similar requirements: low power, capacitive touch component, thin and lightweight. Except where there is a software component to the display performance (as with the Fire), the DisplayMate comparison is limited to an observation of how these tablets’ displays perform.

Last minute Christmas shoppers, take notice. Amazon has your back. The online retailer announced free expedited shipping on many items. Stop procrastinating and get your Christmas shopping done. Or wait a bit longer. The cut-off is tomorrow night anyway.

Order by 8 pm PT on December 21 for free two-day shipping on the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G and $199 Kindle Fire. Amazon is already selling the product family at a rate of more than 1 million units per week and this offer will likely up that count. To take advantage of the offer, shoppers simply need to add the desired Kindle to their shopping cart.

But if the Kindle isn’t on your shopping list, Amazon has an even more tempting offer involving free one-day shipping. The offer only applies to a limited selection of items, but if the order is placed by 11:59 pm PT on December 21, Amazon will throw in free one-day shipping. The expedited shipping will mostly likely get the item to its location with plenty of time for wrapping before Christmas morning.

I say you put off buying your significant other’s gift just a little bit longer. You’ve already waited this long so why not wait a bit longer? Thankfully both of these offers expire tomorrow evening. That leaves plenty of time for more procrastination, right? I mean, you have plenty of time to take advantage of these offers. 36 hours is, like, forever.

A number of prominent folks have been ripping into the Kindle Fire lately, claiming that it is slow, exhibits poor UX choices, and that consumers are returning them en masse. Heck, even the affable Marco Arment writes “If I didn’t need the Fire for Instapaper testing, I’d return it.”

Tough crowd.

But there’s another narrative that says this is a secret success. Analysts estimate that Amazon will sell 5 million of the devices this quarter, a little under half the iPads sold in Q4 2011 (although the Fire has been on sale for a shorter period). I have a feeling that Amazon will hit or just graze this mark once it tallies holiday sales but, Amazon being Amazon, they’ll never announce total sales. Marco Arment or no Marco Arment, the Fire will do just fine.

The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse. It’s made for the mass of men and women who have been looking into this whole tablet business and like what they see. But it is, first and foremost, a reading device and to fault it for not playing Angry Birds well or offering a sub-par Netflix experience is to ignore its primary goal: to inject the concept of Amazon content downloads into a consumer base that is increasingly inundated with video, audio, and ebook sources.

The Kindle Fire isn’t for the Marco Arment’s of the world. It’s for the folks who have priced the competition – the $529 Xyboard, the $499 iPad – and refused to take the plunge. Aside from a few mid-range sources (Vizio comes to mind, as does Viewsonic) there has been little support for the lower end by major manufacturers. When Amazon put their might behind something that may, at best, be frustrating to power users, the general consumer will scoop it up. In short, Kindle Fire, like the Nook Color before it, was the tablet I was waiting to buy for my mom.

The Kindle Fire clearly has some issues. The power button is horrible, for example. However, if you stay in Amazon’s walled garden of books and content, straying only occasionally to download a game or app, your experience is going to be more than acceptable. What frustrates the Android and iPad power user is the sense that the Fire should be so much better. It can’t and won’t be. Amazon isn’t selling to the power user. In a tech market obsessed with Tegra chips and Ice Cream Sandwich, the Fire is a device alone, designed from the ground up to be Amazon incarnate, from now unto eternity. Honeycomb? They don’t need no stinking Honeycomb.

In the end Amazon will cry all way to the bank as the Fire sells out over the holiday and is updated next year to faster and potentially slimmer hardware. It’s hard to accept, but Amazon doesn’t need the hardware geeks salivating over its specs. All it needs to do is serve up copies of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.

With this morning’s addition of 16,000 Italian-language ebooks, and 22,000 Spanish-language books, Amazon has updated the total number of digital books it claims to offer through its Kindle Store. The company says the new Kindle Store now offers over 900,000 titles in English and other languages, and indeed, the eBooks section actually turns up 950,000+ search results.

For the record: this is eBooks only – all in all, there are more than 1 million books, newspapers, magazines and blogs available for Amazon Kindle today, the company professes on this page (see ‘Massive Selection’) and elsewhere.

Conveniently, Juniper Research this morning released a new report on mobile eBook sales, which it forecasts to reach close to $10 billion ($9.7b) by 2016, up from $3.2 billion this year.

The research firm says the expected jump in eBook sales for portable devices can be attributed to the growing number of dedicated eReader devices on the market, an upsurge in usage across smartphones and tablet computers and the rise of brand bookstore apps like Apple’s iBookstore and, of course, Amazon’s Kindle Store.

Juniper Research says the increasing demand for tablets means that such devices will account for nearly 30 percent of all eBook downloads by 2016.

Perhaps surprisingly, the firm claims smartphones are not, and are unlikely to become, a primary reading device in markets other than Japan (due to the manga comics phenomenon there).

Amazon this morning announced the fresh availability of an Italian-language Kindle, and the opening of an Italian Kindle Store, offering customers over 16,000 Italian-language Kindle books. The same thing is happening in Spain, obviously with a Spanish-language Kindle and a custom Spanish Kindle Store (over 22,000 titles).

In addition, Amazon announced that authors and publishers in both countries are now able to make their books available in the new Amazon.es and Amazon.it Kindle Stores using its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform (Spanish / Italian).

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Amazon this morning pounded itself on the chest once more for selling Kindle devices as if they were hotcakes, particularly during last (Black) Friday. According to the company, it was the “best Black Friday ever” for the Kindle family, with Kindle sales “increasing 4x over last year”. As usual, don’t expect Amazon to share hard sales numbers, because they never do.

We’ll have to do with analyst estimates, which I’m sure will be rolling in during the course of this week (today is Cyber Monday and will likely result in another sales spike for Kindle devices). The number does run in the millions, of course, and Dave Limp, Kindle VP, is quoted as follows:

“Even before the busy holiday shopping weekend, we’d already sold millions of the new Kindle family.”

Amazon also reiterated, again, that its tablet computer, the Kindle Fire, is its bestselling product on Amazon.com. In fact, they say this has been the case for the past 8 weeks now, since the device was introduced on September 28.

Related: Black Friday E-Commerce Spending Up 26 Percent To A Record $816M; Amazon Most Visited Retailer

Amazon’s extra-large Kindle DX is available this weekend (which is to say for the next few hours) for the low, low price of $259, down from its normal $379. It’s telling that even the lowered price still seems ridiculously high, considering that smaller but more advanced models are selling for under $100. How long can this outlier live in a world dominated by cheap, pocketable, touchscreen e-readers?

In its current form, the fact is it’s likely on its way out. The Kindle Keyboard and indeed the graphite look in general are on their way out, to be replaced by the lighter, thinner, more touchable new generation. But there’s a problem: the DX is one of the very few e-readers that doesn’t use the same 6″ E-Ink screen as everyone else. Amazon probably knows there’s demand there, but perhaps the time is not yet right to strike.

As you no doubt remember, the Fire was rumored even before its release to be the first of two or more tablets; the next one is supposed to have a larger screen. Makes sense. Amazon wanted to test the waters, and the 7″ tablet was a much easier way to do that. The popularity of the tablet (despite a lukewarm critical reception) doesn’t guarantee a larger version, but I think Amazon would be fools not to do it.

What does this have to do with the DX? As long as they’re unveiling one big e-reader, why not two? Okay, that’s not very convincing. But the DX is a fish out of water right now, and it needs to be either replaced or put out to pasture. I think Amazon is going to keep the large e-reader as a premium option, but it needs more time to engineer it. Who knows, maybe they’re waiting on the next set of screens from E-Ink.

If I had to prophesy, I’d expect a late-summer event with a bigger Fire (the “Flame” maybe?) and a bigger, improved DX, and depending on E-Ink, perhaps an improved screen. By that time, remember, the high-res iPad 3 will supposedly be out, as will a few other high-res tablets that will offer a superior reading experience owing to their superior displays, LCD as they may be.

Personally, I can’t wait for a decent large-screen e-reader. These little ones are frustrating and it saddens me to see the leaders of the e-reader industry putting out products that are scarcely distinguishable from one another.

[via The Digital Reader]

According to new consumer survey data from ChangeWave Research, Amazon’s Kindle Fire is poised to become the first real competitor to the Apple iPad, with one in five planned tablet buyers (22%) indicating they will purchase the Kindle Fire. This is the first time since the original iPad’s launch that the number two device ever achieved a double-digit percentage in terms of consumer interest.

The data comes from a November 2011 survey of 3,043 North American consumers, who were polled on their past, current and future tablet-buying plans. According to the results, 2% of respondents had already pre-ordered the device, 5% said they were “very likely” to buy and 12% said they’re “somewhat likely” to buy.

Of course, the problem with surveys like this is that consumer interest doesn’t always mirror real-world buying trends. It’s easy to indicate you like a product, but it’s much harder to actually open your wallet and pay for it. That said, what this survey does show is the power of the Amazon and Kindle brands in the minds’ of consumers.

Unfortunately, Amazon may have to trade on its brand awareness and affinity to make the Kindle Fire a hit. The tablet has received mixed to downright negative reviews from a variety of sources including The NYT’s David Pogue, The WSJ’s Walt Mossberg, The Economist, Wired, Engadget, The Verge and others. Reviewers claim the software lacks polish and feels sluggish. “

“You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger,” was one of the more memorable Kindle Fire slams from Pogue. Meanwhile, Mossberg summarily dismissed it with just a few sentences:

“To be clear, the Kindle Fire is much less capable and versatile than the entry-level $499 iPad 2. It has a fraction of the apps, a smaller screen, much weaker battery life, a slower Web browser, half the internal storage and no cameras or microphone. It also has a rigid and somewhat frustrating user interface far less fluid than Apple’s.”

Yikes.

And yet, Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle, announced last week that the Fire had become the best-selling product across all of Amazon.com.

Still, we wonder how many unsatisfied customers will return their Kindle Fires later on? Or will the tablet be “good enough,” given its low price point?

If consumers buy, then regret, their Kindle Fire purchase, that could be a problem for the brand further down the road. As ChangeWave also notes, customer satisfaction is one of the key reason’s for Apple’s iPad dominance, with 74% of owners saying they’re “very satisfied” with their device. Only 49% say the same for all other tablet manufacturers combined.

November’s research also showed increasing tablet demand, including an uptick due to the holidays. 14% of respondents claimed they would buy a tablet in the next 90 days, a number that’s up 8 points since August. Despite the expected Kindle Fire gains, Apple still leads by a wide margin, with 65% indicating they will buy the iPad compared with the 22% demonstrating interest in the Kindle Fire.

I hate these kind of videos. There’s enough waste in electronics that we don’t need to destroy stuff that is in already perfect condition (hence our refusal to post those ridiculous Will It Blend videos). However, this is for science!

A seemingly new site, Gizmoslip did a Mythbusters on the Nook Tablet and theKindle Fire. The winner, as you’ll find out, was the Nook Tablet. The Fire’s screen shattered fairly effusively while the Nook took some long cracks in the corner.

Does this prove anything? Probably not, but clearly the Nook’s fairly clunky-looking plastic edging was good for something.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is arriving at many a home this week, and as expected with a launch of this magnitude, there are a few bugs yet to be squashed. Some users are reporting issues with wifi reception, and others say that the device shuts off its wireless when you turn the display off.

We’ve had some connection issues with our own unit, and many commenters on Amazon’s support forums are reporting spotty connectivity, disconnections, or an inability to connect in the first place. Some users report that the issue can be fixed by tweaking settings on the router: changing to static IPs instead of DHCP-assigned addresses worked for one, and a full restart of the router worked for another. A customer service rep has recommended the latter, while resetting the Fire as well, but this is a pretty standard remedy (turn it off and on again).

There’s currently no official word from Amazon on this matter, and it’s not clear how many devices are actually affected. It’s unfortunate that one of the Fire’s big features is that a PC is totally unnecessary, yet for many it seems the first thing they’ll have to do is side-load an update that fixes the wifi.

Another user reports that the wireless connection shuts off when you turn off the display. If you’re listening to internet radio or the like, this is obviously a big problem. I suppose it’s a comfort that there are plenty of users who have not had the chance to experience this problem, because their wifi doesn’t work in the first place.

I have no doubt Amazon will make this right, but it’s still a pain to have these troubles at launch. Readers, are you having the same problems?

Amazon has made the Android-based source code of the Kindle Fire available for download. It’s quite large — over 800 megabytes — and won’t be of any use to casual users. It will, however, enable some custom builds of the software and ROM hacking in the future.

Naturally, lots of the Kindle Fire is not, in fact, open source development. What they’re releasing is likely (no one has taken a close look just yet) the heavily modified Android 2.2 code on which their custom OS is based.

While this release probably won’t have many surprises, based as it is on quite an old version of Android, it will include vital information for hackers. Custom libraries, APIs, drivers, and so on — though there will be plenty Amazon won’t share as well, original code not covered under any open source license.

It will be interesting to see if the hackers can perform optimizations and hacks without disturbing what I am sure is a delicate balance between the underlying OS and the tightly-integrated Amazon services. Providing the source code so promptly is clearly a gesture of goodwill by Amazon, but that doesn’t mean they have to make it easy for people to modify their devices. For example, rooting has been shown to break streaming in some cases.

The device has already been rooted; we’ll update as soon as there are first significant developments in the Fire hacking scene. Update: a quick perusal of the forums and I find that many Google applications (GMail, Maps, Reader) are working if you sideload them, but some have a few idiosyncrasies in the install process.

[via BriefMobile]

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.

That said, it is possible they share a processor unit; reports had TI as the supplier, and 1GHz sounds about right. Curiously, it’s not visible on the surface of the PCB, or is integrated in such a way that it can’t be identified without a more invasive teardown. But TI provided the transceivers, power manager, and so on, so it’s a safe bet. Update: yes, it was hiding under the RAM module, and it is a TI OMAP 4430, the same type used in the Playbook.

One thing they mention that I hadn’t noted before is that the battery’s charge time assumes an outlet connection for the 1.8 amps it supports; most USB ports and cables don’t provide that, so expect a longer charge time on USB (as you probably should with most devices). Total charge is stated as 4400mAh, less than the iPad 2′s 6600, but of course this has a significantly smaller screen and less intense CPU/GPU.

There don’t appear to be any hidden or unannounced features — personally, I was hoping for a microphone inside the speaker assembly, for use with Amazon’s latest acquisition. But it seems that the Fire is exactly what they say it is, no more, no less.

They’re just finishing up the teardown as I write this, and may include some extra information from Chipworks, as they have done before, so I’ll update this post if pertinent data is uncovered.

Emboldened by solid pre-order numbers for their new Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon has bumped its order numbers from manufacturers yet again, this time to a round five million units by year’s end. Presumably they are looking to fulfill as many orders as possible before the all-important holiday rush.

The change isn’t anything like an order of magnitude, as even early reports had Amazon ordering “millions” of screens, and leaked sales estimates were for four million units sold before 2011 ends. Considering the relative unpopularity of even the highest-profile Android tablets preceding it, these numbers appeared optimistic at first; now they appear to have been conservative.

It’s a drop in the bucket compared with iPad sales, but the Amazon board is probably breathing a collective sigh of relief, having spent a huge sum of money developing the device. The Fire will likely be the second-place tablet for some time at this rate, which, when first place belongs to one of the best-selling gadgets of all time, isn’t a bad place to be.

The tablet ships on the 15th (next Tuesday), and is of course still available for pre-order. We’ll have a full review up after we get our hands on a device.