Maybe it is owing to the fact that the rumored high-end Kindle Tablet is code named “Hollywood”, but there has been some talk going around recently about the possibility that this is going to be a video focused device. The idea is being described as a sort of Kindle for movies. With the most recent information that has come out regarding technical specs, especially in the context of the last few developments in the Amazon.com media services.
At the moment there are a few ways to get video to your computer. You can go with Netflix and stream all the movies you want, but really the selection is fairly limited and the quality has a tendency to be questionable at times. Youtube is generally the cheapest and most widely supported option, but it isn’t usually the best way to find what you want to watch. Apple will sell you movies, but they seem comparatively overpriced. Even Cable companies will typically provide On-Demand video for subscribers, but these tend to be the worst of the bunch in any number of ways. In spite of there being a number of avenues, however, nobody has really come up with an impressive option. The best choice so far is probably Netflix, but if Amazon can come up with a decent streaming/downloading service selection then it shouldn’t be terribly hard for them to make it work. The Amazon Instant Video Store seems to be a push in that direction and might well be paving the way for the new Kindle Tablet.
The “Hollywood” version of the Kindle Tablet will supposedly be featuring the quad-core NVidia Tegra 3 . This would make it faster than any other tablet on the market today by a fair margin while at the same time not sacrificing battery life at quite the extreme that a quad-core processor in a tablet would imply. It would also support a display resolution of up to 1920 x 1200, which is a noticeable step up from the iPad’s 1024 x 768 and would allow for HD quality movie viewing.
While the available information would therefore seem to support the idea of a movie viewing Kindle equivalent, the Kindle Tablet’s other specs remain a big factor. Without knowing what will be available in terms of storage, connectivity, and display technology it is fairly difficult to figure out exactly what is going on. Storage may be a moot point, given Amazon’s cloud-based music service and the ability to stream movies, but it would make more sense to allow for full downloads to ensure maximum performance and battery life. Connectivity would have a lot to do with quality concerns as well, of course. The display is really the big point. Since Amazon has basically built an entire campaign based on the shortcomings of the iPad’s LCD display compared to that of the Kindle, we have to assume that they have something else in mind for the Kindle Tablet. Which way they go on that point may well be the most interesting bit of information in the end.