By now, you all know the facts — Amazon unveiled a new tablet today called Kindle Fire. Most of the press is saying things about how good it is for content consumption, the OS, the specs and other stuff I don’t really care about. In-between the lines, however, there is something that should be the really important feature of this release: Silk.
Silk is a new web browser that runs (currently) exclusively on the Kindle Fire tablet. It uses a hybrid architecture: all the browser’s subsystems are available both on the tablet and on the Amazon cloud. When the user visits a webpage, the browser decides which of the browser’s subsystems will run locally and which ones will run on the cloud. In practice, what it does is to use the huge network infrastructure of EC2 to download all the content and then the client-side of the browser has to download only one simple stream of data from the cloud, which should help improve performance.
All in all, looks like a great solution. And technically speaking, it is. However, there is a caveat: this also means that Amazon has access to every move you make on the web. Moreover, they can use your web activity to crawl the web. Do ‘Google’ and ‘Mechanical Turk’ ring a bell for anyone? Anyway, how Amazon will handle privacy issues and this huge amount of valuable data is yet to be seen.
About the tablet itself, it looks good — reminds me of a Playbook. And although it is Android-based, it doesn’t run Android ipsis literis at all. This OS is a fork of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) which has no Google apps and no Android Market. Instead, it features a newly designed UI by Amazon that is dedicated to media consumption, which is integrated to all of the Amazon ecosystem (including the Amazon app store).
This is good. Amazon seems to understand that tablets are used mostly for content consumption and sticked with that idea. It hasn’t fallen into the same trap as Microsoft, which thinks the tablet should run a full-blown OS and be capable of doing everything, nor into the follow-the-leader game (a.k.a. “I want to be the iPad”) Google and Android manufacturers are playing. It doesn’t mean the Fire is an “iPad-killer”, as part of the press is stating. However, this could be a serious competitor against Android tablets, given its price point and the fact it is content-rich (which the Google ecosystem currently isn’t).
I’m really looking forward to testing one of these. If it’s as interesting as the Amazon demos show, I believe it’s gonna be a huge success.
Related stories: iPad, Tablets, Technology