Now here’s an interesting little nugget Jeff Bezos didn’t want you to know about when he introduced his new Kindle tablets: the Kindle Fire HD is ad-supported, and originally, you would not have been able to remove those advertisements from the device. Over the weekend, the company reversed this policy, allowing you to permanently remove the advertisements from your Fire HD for $15.
This all fits in with the purpose of a tablet like the Kindle Fire. Bezos was pretty clear during the device’s unveiling that its singular purpose is to get you to buy stuff at Amazon, and that the hardware is not supposed to turn a profit in and of itself. The ads, which are displayed on the lock screen, consist of general advertisements, and, of course, special offers from Amazon itself.
In essence, all tablets work this way – to more or lesser degrees – to get you to buy yourself into an ecosystem. The iPad, for instance, comes loaded with stuff like News Stand, which can’t be removed or even placed in a folder, and, on top of that, makes it very annoying and cumbersome to buy content from other vendors than Apple. It’s not surprising that Amazon would follow suit, but persistent ads on the lockscreen are, of course, way, way worse.
Interestingly enough, the one company from which you’d expect ads plastered all over the place doesn’t actually do as such. The Nexus 7 does come loaded with a widget that’s a front to the Play Store, but it’s easily removed. With the Nexus 7 running Android, you can even switch to a different application store, and there are no restrictions put in place on where and how you can buy content.
Originally, Amazon had no intention of allowing Fire owners to remove the advertisements, but over the weekend, the company reversed this decision. In a statement to The Verge, the company said users will be able to pay a one-time $15 fee to have the ads removed, but that it doesn’t expect a whole lot of users to do so. Of course, a much better solution is to simply ditch the Fire’s Frankendroid altogether, and switch to CM (whenever it becomes available).
I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing more and more of this sort of stuff. The Xbox 360, for instance, is currently plastered with ads all over the place, even for paid Xbox Live Gold subscribers such as myself. The inability to remove crap like this from devices we supposedly “own” is just a further sign that this “post-PC” world so many people gush about is nothing but a change of ownership from user to manufacturer.
The Google Nexus 7 would be a better choice. Unadulterated Android Jelly Bean, on very good hardware at a great price for starters. The Kindle app is available for it, if such is your need, along with apps for reading free eBooks.
Except that the Nexus 7 doesn’t have an HDMI port. Which probably matters more to some than others, but to me, it matters a lot. Any other tablet with these sorts of specs are 10″ in size, which is bigger than I like, and cost $350+.
Uhhh…old article is OLD, Amazon has already announced that just like the previous one you can pay to get rid of the ads,IIRC they said its $20 a pop for the regular eReaders and something like $40 or $50 for the Fires.
For everybody complaining though di anybody ask WHY they did that? Its simple really, they found that everyone was buying the ad supported units, something like 12 or 13 to 1 was I believe the number cited, so like any business they went with what sold. I mean does this surprise ANYONE? that users would take cheap with ads over more expensive without? We are talking about a 20% added cost to the low end units.
Personally I’m gonna get my mom one of the eReader units for XMas, as long as they target the ads to her interests like they do the email she’ll not only not mind the ads, she’ll actually look forward to them. i know she appreciates the emails they send that tell her when her favorite authors have a new book coming out so if they keep them targeted like that it’ll be a perect XMas gift.
Kinda hard to make this one about Apple, isn’t it? LOL I have an ad-supported Kindle and I rarely even notice the ads on it. Maybe it’s because they are static black & white ads that only appear when you put the device into sleep mode in between reading sessions. We will see what the ads on the new Kindle Fire look like, but I doubt they will be as unobtrusive as on the readers.
Kinda makes me hopeful that a bright hacker will subvert the advert system and deliver every Kindle user a Penis Storm a la secondlife.
I’m going to miss the past of owning material things
I couldn’t agree more
Dystopia are us, buy or die…did we all collectively sign in blood and just forget?
Ads are just the start. It’s the closed ecosystems that scare me. Apple showed the way, now everyone’s trying to do it. It’s become culturally acceptable, whereas until now a PC owner would NOT consider it acceptable to only buy their software from one online retailer who would get a 30% cut of the software developers’ income.
ZOMG! Persistent ads on a screen the user would only see when they’re not actually using the device as a trade off for lower costs… the bastards! How dare they put something that many users actually find useful in place of pictures of dead authors or lolcats!
And just how long do you think it will be before the hacking community has Jellybean running on the new Fire? No need to pay $15 to get rid of ads. 😉
Thoughtful piece on Amazon’s Kindle strategy by Horace Dediu at Asymco
http://www.asymco.com/2012/09/08/how-many-new-kindles-will-amazon-s…
..it can be rooted and something far less locked down and more advanced like CyanogenMod 10 can be installed. Without the rooting/new OS, the new Fire will be horribly locked down with far less apps available than Google Play (and the pay-to-remove ads too).
BTW, you don’t need an HDMI port on a tablet because it’s a portable device that would be a complete ball-ache to constantly attach and re-attach to watch a movie or play a game on a big screen. That’s what you get either a cheap Android set-top box or something like a cheap media centre device (Raspberry Pi if you really must go bare-bones) that *permanently attaches to HDMI. Ouya+XBMC is promised for next year and that’s a feasible route if the hardware isn’t vapourware.
Here in the UK, Amazon missed the boat somewhat by never shipping the original Kindle Fire outside the US, effectively allowing other brands of 7″ tablets (mainly cheap Chinese imports like the dubiously named Ainol – I kid you not! – to get a foothold until the selling-like-hot-cakes Nexus 7 came along).
I got my 16GB UK Nexus 7 for only 20 pounds more than the equivalent new Kindle Fire will sell in the UK (thanks to Tesco briefly incorrectly offering 20 pounds off 🙂 ) and I’ve already got a ton of Google Play apps on it, rooted and tried out two series of ROMs (Modaco and CyanogenMod 10). I’ve had a decent amount of value out of it after a short time and I keep my heavier/larger HP TouchPad at home exclusively now 🙂
BTW, it amuses me that the 3 tablets I have, an HP TouchPad, a Nexus 7 and a Playbook cost in total about the same as an iPad 3 (which I wouldn’t ever buy because it’s a horribly locked down device)! And, yes, not one of my 3 tablets has an HDMI socket despite me owning two plasma TVs with multiple HDMI inputs – I use dedicated Revo units for HDMI media duties.
Edited 2012-09-10 19:32 UTC
You are pirating if you install Google Play either way, none of the Google apps (Play, Maps, Gmail, etc.) are free. For more “normal” Android devices the cost of paying Google for a license is baked into the purchase price, so installing the Google apps on a Kindle is plain old piracy.
Which I don’t say you can’t do, but I don’t want there to be too much confusion about what is free and not.
Actually no. Google apps are downloadable for free! However you cannot include them in another product without breaching the license.
Where is the license granting people use of the Google apps?
I won’t buy a tablet that doesn’t have an HDMI port on it. If I’m going to use a tablet, which is basically just a portable media playback device, then I better be able to easily take it somewhere like my friends house who has a high-end 100″ projector, plug it in, and enjoy.
IMO not putting an hdmi port on a tablet is just plain stupid.
Isn’t the whole point of buying the Kindle Fire to get an Amazon integrated environment? It isn’t what I want for me, but I’m a developer. My cousin got one for his daughter, she loves it. It is exactly what he wanted for her. Ads are a big part of that environment.
I get the complaint. Amazon is telling us where we would probably like to spend our money. But the alternative is what exactly? Only read what friends recommend? Only watching what friends and family recommend? Pay for a newspaper and read the ads there instead.
As near as I can tell the ads are not intrusive and do not slow anything down. They are just on the lock screen. What do I care about the lock screen. If it has the date/time and a button to unlock, everything else is just a background image to me.
Unless my basic assumption is wrong and you have to wait x number of seconds or click through some ad to use your device. In that case I would say avoid it like the plague.
When was the last time advertising influenced you in even the slightest bit on a purchase? Seriously, I can’t remember a time in the last decade it influenced me. My purchasing is dictated by my desires, my interests… which I do my own research on, to find out about stuff that I might need or just want to buy. After all, if I didn’t have an interest, I wouldn’t be looking it up in the first place, would I?
Companies want to track me and “target” advertisements directly at me that they “think” will somehow help me? Quit spying, f–k off and leave me the hell alone. Quit stalking and invading my privacy. Helping me would be getting out of my god damn business and allowing my to use my own damn brain. But since that won’t happen, disabling third-party cookies completely and installing either Ghostery or Do Not Track Plus is the next best thing. And, of course, NoScript for added protection, increased speed, and less resource usage in general.
I’ve been practically ad-free for about a decade thanks to Adblock, and it’s virtually impossible for me to use a web browser without it. I just can’t do it. I don’t know how I ever got by without it before. I don’t watch TV, listen to the radio or read magazines either, so to me advertising effectively died with the introduction of Adblock. I only occasionally see it at someone else’s house when they’re watching TV, and I remember why I hated the damn service so much.
Edited 2012-09-11 04:32 UTC
I think that ads operate at a more subconscious level. Since most of them teach you nothing about the characteristics of the product that is being sold, surely they are meant to teach you about the existence of said product instead.
I mean it in sense of exploiting human ignorance and lack of interest. As an example, if I weren’t into tech-focused websites and decided to buy one of these shiny tablets, I would probably begin by looking at Apple’s offering since it’s the one that I see ads about everywhere. It wouldn’t be disdain towards alternatives, I simply wouldn’t know about or remember them.
This is all speculation, of course. But if that’s truly the way it works, then the worst enemy of ads is not ad-blockers (which you can only use on computers, while ads are everywhere), but those real-world retail chains that display products grouped by category, forcing you to take a look at the competition before buying.
(Which, going back to my former example, sheds a new light on Apple’s habit of wanting its products grouped in their own category, doesn’t it ?)
Edited 2012-09-11 06:38 UTC
What you described would, in my opinion, be the “best” (if there could even be such a thing when it comes to this subject) kind of advertising. The kind of stuff that doesn’t try to forcibly ram shit down your throat. Instead, we’ve got stuff like what what Vonage put out a few years ago with their annoying little jingle, pounded in your head once or twice every single f–king commercial break. And I only know because while at a friend’s house a TV was always on, and whether I was actually watching it with them in the same room or in a completely different room minding my own business… you just can’t miss it even if you want to.
Things like that, they’re not the only culprit, just the only one I can think of (like I said, advertising is dead to me). I have determined years ago that I will NEVER support a company that has such annoying commercials. See what that got them? I remember their name… and I remember to avoid them. Oh, and I almost forgot; more recently, Yorkshire Farms–their rap commercials annoyed the hell out of me so bad, I’ll never buy their products. Maybe I’m just ass-backwards, but these companies’ advertisements actually work AGAINST them sometimes.
Oh yeah, I remember alright… not to buy anything with that name on it in the future. Note to such companies: Thanks for trying… to force shit down my throat with some of the most annoying ads possible, overplayed to hell and back. I’ll keep your company’s name in mind, in my own little blacklist. You are precicely the reason I use things like Adblock Plus, and refuse to browse the web without it.
Edited 2012-09-11 07:10 UTC
That’s true, but not all ads are so awfully designed that they represent a pure concentrated moment of annoyance.
Some examples off the top of my head
-John West salmon (on TV, can be found on Youtube)
-Ikea’s “tidy up” series (ditto)
-Project Wonderful’s webcomic ads (on pretty much every freely accessible webcomic out there)
I try to refrain myself from using ad blockers. If websites have such an awful advertising policy that they take hours to load (on my super-wondrous pirated EDGE connection) or are painful to read, it’s better to notify the author about it or leave than to just ignore the annoyances that people who don’t use Adblock go through. We won’t change the fact that so far, nothing better than advertising has been found to pay for web hosting costs anyway.
Edited 2012-09-11 07:17 UTC
I have to admit, as much as I despise advertising, I have seen at least a few ads in my life that I actually liked. I’m not saying they’re not out there. They’re just incredibly rare, as companies try to be memorable in the most incredibly annoying ways to get a sale. That seems more true than ever before these days. But even today, very few of them come to mind. They’re a thing of the past, replaced by purely annoying garbage, repeated over and over and over again.
I couldn’t remember a single Nintendo 64 commercial now, but being a gamer from a young age I’ll never forget “Get N or Get Out.” I also liked the Budweiser frogs, mainly for the humor, but of course those ones are now illegal. Oh noooo, can’t advertise beer with talking frogs now, it might corrupt the children into drinking something that is not pure Hâ‚‚O but includes small amounts of that dreaded chemical CH₃CHâ‚‚OH! [sigh] Of course, IMO, Bud sucks anyway and I’ll take a good craft beer any day, but that’s beside the point.
And never mind those chemicals that are much worse, which the government allows to be consumed legally–and those that are much safer that remain strictly illegal as if they’re the devil’s work and they’ll turn a person into a maniac and cause them to go on a killing spree or something (gotta thank those loony Christians for that).
Edited 2012-09-11 07:47 UTC