Amazon's Kindle Fire: does it have something to offer other than cheapness?

The latest company to jump on the tablet bandwagon-- in as much as such a bandwagon actually exists-- is Amazon with the launch of its new Android-based Kindle Fire.

Clearly, the distinguishing feature of buying Amazon's offering is that the device is coupled with Amazon's purchasing ecosystem, as opposed to, say, Apple's if you were to buy an iPad.

One thing that strikes me is that at present at least, the majority of media focus appears to be on the price, which at $199 does seem aggressive to the point of being a loss leader. When Apple originally launched the iPad, arguably the spark of the recent tablet frenzy among the rest of the market, it is interesting to compare Apple's approach of offering what they saw as a "fairly priced"-- but by no means "cheap" if you sounded opinion at the time-- marketed essentially on features. Amazon clearly have their ecosystem on their side compared to the average Miscellaneous Android Tablet Manufacturer X. But they do appear to be buying into the price-focussed strategy of the other manufacturers. It will be interesting to see how this plays out!

What do you think? I'd love to hear your opinion about the Kindle Fire.

Dear universe: please make your default settings sensible

I'd occasionally noticed that alerts for my calendar events would sometimes go off at odd times on my iPad. For example, I'd wake up in the morning to find that the "5 minute" alert for a mid-morning meeting had already gone off. I suppose the first couple of times, I just assumed I must have entered something wrong when setting up the event. But, being the aspiring cross between Columbo and Paddington Bear that I am, gradually my suspicions were aroused.

Luckily, some other people more patient than I am with spuriously designed user interfaces were able to come to the rescue. In case you haven't found it, the offending setting is an option burried in the "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" section of your iPhone/iPad settings curiously entitled "Time Zone Support". With this set to a particular Time Zone (rathr than simply being switched off), then your device will not adjust calendar events to match your current time zone.

So you might be thinking "hey, what's your beef, this is a great feature to have, no?". Well, yes, it's a great optional feature. But the things that strike me are:

(a) to say that the iPhone/iPad are supposed to be the holy grail of PDAs (aren't they?), it doesn't seem like a terribly fine-grained feature, particular as there is a "Location" field in calendar events, and that thanks to the miracles of GPS, the device knows where you are at any given moment (or at least, knows where you are to within an approximation of a couple of skyscrapers/underground bunkers-- usually good enough to tell what time zone you're in);
(b) why give this option a silly, non-intuitive name and then turn it on by default? why by default would I tend to want events not to be in synch with where I am at the moment, given that the whole raison d'être of these devices is for travelling...?

Well, I'm sort of happy now I've discovered the option. But on the other hand, grrrrrr.

iPad for programmers: new section and survey

In preparation for a new section of the site dedicated to programming tools for iPad users, the site contains a survey to find out which tools people are currently using. If you have a few seconds to spare, you are invited to fill in this very quick survey.

What kind of tools are we interested in? Well, essentially any iPad app that you consider to be "programming-related" in some way: for example, code editors, tools to run scripts, calculators that ease with programming-related tasks etc. Even general tools such as VNC clients are also welcome if you use them for programming-related tasks.