Several market research outfits released a bevy of interesting smartphone data this week, highlighted by the Canalys research group’s finding that a majority of smartphones being shipped now have touchscreens.
According to Canalys’ latest report, touchscreen phones accounted for 55% of the 54.5 million smartphone units that shipped in the fourth quarter. Touchscreen smartphone shipments for all of 2009 totaled 75 million, or 45% of the 166 million smartphones shipped throughout the year.
So Amazon.com has bought itself a startup with an innovative touch-screen technology. The only logical assumption is that it intends to build a touch-enabled Kindle. You’ve gotta think that it’ll take a while to incorporate the new technology into a future Kindle. And given that the last all-new Kindle shipped nearly a year ago, there are probably at least two future Kindles in the works: a next-generation one and a next-next-generation one.
Amazon’s Kindle Gets Ready to Battle Apple’s iPadTrying to figure out where the Kindle is headed was aways interesting food for thought, but it got even more interesting when Apple showed off the iPad last week. The current Kindle and the iPad are a study in contrasts: The Kindle is a monochrome, long-life device, button-driven built almost entirely for reading books; the iPad is a color, short-life, touchscreen Swiss Army Knife.
But the only scenario in which the Kindle is unaffected by the iPad (and possibly iPad-like gizmos from other companies) is one in which the iPad flops almost instantaneously. That seems unlikely. So here are five possible ”Superkindles” (to steal New York Times times reporter Nick Bilton’s term).
Computing giant Apple is expected to launch its new tablet computer which could kickstart a £600 million a year industry.
The tablet – which combines the processing power of a laptop with the portability of a smartphone – is expected to be unveiled at a press conference in San Francisco, California.
