Amazon Kindle Among the Most Gifted Holiday Gifts

Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that 2011 was the best holiday ever for the Kindle family as customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers.

More Kindle holiday facts for  2011.

• Throughout December, customers purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices per week.
• The new Kindle family held the top three spots on the Amazon.com best seller charts – #1: Kindle Fire, #2: Kindle Touch, #3: Kindle.
• Kindle Fire is the #1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since its introduction 13 weeks ago.
• Kindle is also the best-selling product on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es and Amazon.it this holiday season.
• Gifting of Kindle books was up 175 percent between this Black Friday and Christmas Day compared to the same period in 2010.
• Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for Kindle book downloads.
• Kindle Fire is the best-selling product on Amazon.com’s mobile website and across all of Amazon.com’s mobile applications.

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Amazon Enters The Tablet Market by Launching $199 Kindle Fire

Amazon just put the rest of the tablet world on notice by pricing the Kindle Fire at $199, less than half of the $500 mark that the industry has gravitated toward as a standard price. By doing so, Amazon is redefining for consumers just how much they need to pay for a quality tablet.


The new device, priced at $199, may have the biggest impact on other makers of tablets and e-readers, such as Samsung and Barnes & Noble Inc, which makes Nooks

"It's a Nook killer," said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, which helps merchants sell more on websites including Amazon.com. "And it's a very compelling offering if you're not in the Apple ecosystem already."

The Kindle Fire tablet has a 7-inch screen, free data storage over the Internet and a new browser called Amazon Silk. Amazon expects shipments to start on Nov. 15.

Amazon also introduced the Kindle Touch, an e-reader with no buttons and a touch screen starting at $99. And it cut the price of its basic Kindle e-reader to $79 from $99.

"These are premium products at non-premium prices," Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said. "We are going to sell millions of these."To demonstrate the Kindle Fire, Bezos pulls up a chair. He proudly shows off a lightning-fast Web browser that runs on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing engine and Amazon’s version of the Android app store, with over 10,000 games, e-mail programs, shopping guides, and the like.

However The Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch are being launched in the U.S. only with no detail on when it plans to offer the new devices abroad.


A Amazon still lacks a convincing global strategy compared with Apple,” writes Sarah Rotman-Epps at Forrester. “The iPad is available in 64 countries, and we estimate that 50 percent of iPad sales in 2011 are outside the US.”

This is now a pattern with Amazon. It took two years for the earlier Kindle to make it outside the U.S.. Amazon is also yet to launch its App Store and video service outside North America.

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The Cost Of An iPhone 5 Upgrade: Infographics

The iPhone 5 is on the way, and millions of people are asking themselves, is it time to upgrade? This infographic will point you in the right direction.

This infographic  take a look at the current state of the iPhone 4 and its predecessors, how many apps users have installed, how much they’re using the iPhone and what new features they’d like to see in the next one. That should give us a good idea about whether we should upgrade, and why.

This elaborate infographic is part 1 of a three-part series that will lead us up to the launch of the iPhone 5, which is likely to be announced on Oct. 4. Developed by AYTM (Ask Your Target Market) and research firm PaidViewpointalong with Mashable, the survey asked 1,000 U.S. iPhone owners aged 18 years and older an extensive series of questions.

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43% Smartphones,48billion Mobile App Downloads in 2015:

The mobile applications market has had strong growth over the past several years, as a result of the addition of new products, players, and business models.  According to recent In Stats Research report The smartphone growth will continue to  show rapid growth , driven mainly by increased smartphone penetration, as well as growth in consumer mobile application libraries.  As a result, In-Stat (www.in-stat.com) expects mobile application downloads to reach nearly 48 billion in 2015.
 

In  December 2010, the number of applications in the Apple App Store reached 3,50,000 while Android market reached 80,000. The research  results show that Apple and Android users are significantly more likely than BlackBerry users to have downloaded mobile applications. Smartphone applications are not only about 3G. Almost half of survey respondents report downloading applications over Wi-Fi.

According to an Olswang report in early 2011, smartphones are experiencing accelerating rates of adoption: 22% of UK consumers already have a smartphone, with this percentage rising to 31% amongst 24–35 year olds

Top 5 Insights on the smartphone ecosystem  includes:

• Touchscreens will account for nearly 90% of smartphones shipped in 2011, and will increase to nearly 100% in the next several years.
  
• Smartphones are expected to increase from 23% of total phone shipments in 2010 to 45% in 2015.
  
• In December 2010, the number of applications in the Apple App Store reached 350,000 while Android Market reached 80,000.
  
• Survey results show that Apple and Android users are significantly more likely than BlackBerry users to have downloaded mobile applications.
  
• Smartphone applications are not only about 3G.  Almost half of survey respondents report downloading applications over Wi-Fi.
  

As of the end of 2010, eMarketer estimates 30% of smartphone users in the US had a BlackBerry and 28% had an iPhone, the top two operating systems. But Android’s share of the market is rising quickly. Nielsen tracking surveys found Android pulling ahead among recent smartphone purchasers, and eMarketer predicts that by 2012 Android will be the No. 1 mobile OS in the country.

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