Who cares about stuttering playback on your tablet, right?

Surprisingly, by Stephen Levy in Wired:

That’s why, in a sense, some of the iPad comparisons and cavils you may read today in the hands-on reviews of Fire are somewhat irrelevant in light of this larger issue. Yes, the Fire lacks the industrial-design pyrotechnics that make fanboys foam at the mouth like the iPad does. But who cares? Like a lizard shedding its skin, next year there will be another Fire and in three years the original will look as antiquated as the bizarre-looking Kindle 1 appears today. When you pay $199 for Fire, you’re not buying a gadget—you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia.

“Who cares”? Is that you, Mr. Levy?

I’m sure Amazon will sell a nice amount of Kindle Fires, but I really don’t buy the argument that no one cares about wonky navigation and stuttering playback, if they are just given a golden ticket to lots of movies and books by The DoucheDuke of Amazon.

Apple has currently set the bar for tablets, and they set it damn high. Either do something better, or something else.

I mean, if Microsoft and Nokia can, so can the other guys.

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Let’s attack privacy with Fire

This seems like such a bad idea, speed be damned:

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

We’re all Mechanical Turks now.

/via Chris Espinosa.

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