Pogue's Posts: A New Kindle Fire, Just in Time for the Holiday Season

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Bits: Amazon Updates Kindle Fire Line

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Michael Cronan, Who Gave TiVo and Kindle Their Names, Dies at 61

The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Karin Hibma, with whom he founded the marketing firm Cronan in the early 1980s.

Mr. Cronan, who studied art in college, had many corporations and cultural institutions as clients, but he was most remembered for the pair of brand names he came up with a decade apart.

In the spring of 1997, he was asked to forge a name and an identity for a new device, a digital video recorder developed by a company called Teleworld that offered more sophisticated television recording choices than the videocassette recorder.

“We reviewed probably 1,600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team,” Mr. Cronan told Matt Haughey for his blog PVR (the letters stand for personal video recorder) in 2005.

“We spent the early meetings trying to place a cultural context on the product,” he said. Among the possibilities were Bongo and Lasso, which never got far.

Believing that “we were naming the next TV,” Mr. Cronan recalled, “I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar, so it must contain T and V.”

“I started looking at letter combinations,” he added, “and pretty quickly settled on TiVo.” (The “Vo” portion, he said, had a connection to the Latin and Italian words for vocal sound and voice.) Then came the search for a mascot that Mr. Cronan hoped “would become as recognizable as the mouse ears are to Disney.” He created a TV-shaped smiley character with the name TiVo inscribed on its face, rabbit ears suggesting an early TV set and large, splayed feet. Teleworld changed its name to TiVo Inc.

When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Mr. Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology.

Ms. Hibma said in an interview on Friday that in pondering a brand name, Mr. Cronan “wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio,” while choosing an image that “was about starting something, giving birth to something.” He found the name, she said, by likening use of the new e-reader to “starting a fire.”

Michael Patrick Cronan was born on June 9, 1951, in San Francisco. He studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where he later taught, and received a degree in art from California State University, Sacramento. He was a founder and past president of the San Francisco branch of AIGA, the professional association for design.

Mr. Cronan and his wife expanded their focus in 1992 to create the Walking Man clothing collection, featuring loose-knit tops and pants. Mr. Cronan also designed a pair of 1999 postage stamps, one commemorating the 50th anniversary of NATO and the other promoting prostate cancer awareness, and painted portraits and watercolors.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Cronan is survived by his sons, Shawn HibmaCronan and Nick Cronan; a brother, Christopher; a sister, Patricia Cronan; and a granddaughter.

For all his devotion to marketing and branding, Mr. Cronan felt that sometimes the demands of commerce went too far, as in the often-changing corporate names attached to sports stadiums and concert halls.

“There was a time in American life where going to a sporting event or a concert was sort of magical, because a lot of these places had these fun names,” he told The Denver Post in 2010. “But these days, with the amount of people craving advertising exposure, the sponsors have found a way to sell everything. They’re selling our nostalgia, and it’s sad.”

State of the Art: Nook and Kindle E-Readers Let There Be More Light - Review

When you’re a tech critic, though, the state of the art changes monthly, if not hourly. You toil over writing a masterpiece, and it winds up having the shelf life of milk.

It could be worse. Instead of writing about gadgets, you could be stuck with an even worse treadmill job: making them.

Pity, for example, the poor slobs at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, locked in an endless battle for e-reader supremacy. They play an annual game of leapfrog that would exhaust frogs.

“I see your new color tablet,” says Barnes & Noble’s Nook team, “and I raise you one higher-resolution screen!”

“Oh, yeah?” says Amazon’s Kindle team. “Well, you know the Nook with a self-illuminated screen that you introduced in April? We have one with a better backlight. Take that!”

That’s a real example. There are two kinds of e-book gadgets. There are those with E Ink screens (cheap, light, thin, no color, long battery life, great to read in bright sunlight, useless in the dark). And there are those with color screens (heavier, thicker, pricier, great to read in low light, tough to read in sunlight).

People who opt for E Ink rave about the “printed” look of the black text on a light gray “page.” They can also be found spending $60 on a case that contains a tiny flip-up flashlight — or just carrying one around on a keychain — so that they can read in bed or in other darkish situations. E Ink is so much like paper, it doesn’t light up on its own.

In April, Barnes & Noble changed the game: it offered an E Ink e-reader whose background lights up with a soft glow, like a digital watch. With the introduction of that model — the efficiently named Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight — the company hacked off one enormous item on the list of E Ink drawbacks. Not only is reading in bed practical, it’s actually superior to reading an actual book, since the gentle glowing screen is nowhere near bright enough to keep a sleeping partner awake.

Your move, Kindle.

Amazon’s response to the B&NNSTGL (now $120) is the new Kindle Paperwhite (same price). The headline here is that the Paperwhite’s lighting is better than the Nook’s.

At top brightness, it’s much brighter. More usefully, its lighting is far more even than the Nook’s, whose edge-mounted lamps can create subtle “hot spots” at the top and bottom of the page, sometimes spilling out from there. How much unevenness depends on how high you’ve turned up the light. But in the hot spots, the black letters of the text show less contrast.

The Kindle Paperwhite has hot spots, too, but only at the bottom edge, where the four low-power LED bulbs sit. (Amazon says that from there, the light is pumped out across the screen through a flattened fiber optic cable.) In the middle of the page, where the text is, the lighting is perfectly even: no low-contrast text areas.

The Kindle’s screen also packs in 212 tiny dots an inch, compared with the Nook’s 167, for visibly sharper text.

Both models have touch screens, which is a real joy; you can tap lightly to turn the page or bring up a panel that controls type size, font choice, margins and line spacing. But on the Kindle’s screen, you can use two fingers. That’s primarily useful when you want to adjust the type size (most of us will, in fact, be over 40 at some point); you can just spread two fingers apart, as on an iPad, without having to open some settings screen.

When viewed side-by-side with the Nook GlowLight, the Paperwhite is much more comfortable to read. You could argue that that’s an important factor in a reading tablet.

The Kindle Paperwhite and Nook are about the same height (4.6 inches), but the Kindle is 0.4 inch narrower and slightly thinner. Thin is great — you can cradle the entire thing in one hand; on the other hand, the Nook’s soft-touch back panel has a gentle sculptured ridge that makes one-handed holding comfortable and secure.

All right, the Paperwhite has superior lighting and sharpness. The Nook, however, has some persuasive counterarguments of its own — starting with the value.

Wal-Mart Says It Will Stop Selling Amazon’s Kindle

Target said in May that it would stop selling Kindles, though other stores, including Best Buy, Staples and Office Depot, said Thursday they would continue to carry the devices.

Wal-Mart did not specify why it was discontinuing its Kindle sales, but analysts said it was not hard to decipher, given that the retailer will still sell similar devices from companies like Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble and Samsung.

Physical retailers have been worried about customers who browse in stores and then buy from online competitors instead. Displaying the new Kindles encourages that behavior, analysts said.

While earlier black-and-white Kindles were good only for reading digital books, the newer Kindle Fire, introduced in 2011, can be used for e-books, movies, games, and potentially anything Amazon sells, thanks to a built-in Web browser.

“The Kindle Fire is the Trojan horse,” said Andrew Rhomberg, the chief executive of Jellybooks, an e-book recommendation site. “It’s a shopping platform that covers so many more categories than e-books. It affects Wal-Mart in a different way than the early Kindles and e-readers did.”

Colin Gillis, a technology analyst for BGC Financial, said that by selling Kindles, Wal-Mart was “encouraging its customers to step into that ecosystem.”

“Every time you pick up your Kindle, they’re trying to get you to buy patio furniture” at Amazon, Mr. Gillis said. “If I were Wal-Mart, I certainly would not be encouraging my customers to go down the path of owning a Kindle and buying things from Amazon.”

Moreover, the Kindle line, and most tablets, are only marginally profitable for retailers, said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research.

“A lot of them have had it with tablets other than the iPad,” she said. “They’re not high-margin products, and other than Apple ones, no one is selling these devices in great volumes anyway. For Wal-Mart to drop Amazon is more of a symbolic blow rather than a substantive one.”

However, if more retailers back away from selling the Kindle, Amazon will lose valuable physical display space that it cannot match with a Web site, exposure that becomes especially important during the holiday shopping season.

“Amazon still needs a way to get the hardware into people’s hands,” Mr. Gillis said.

Amazon declined to comment on Wal-Mart’s decision.

The low profit from Kindle sales and the threat of competition from Amazon raise the question of why retailers wanted to sell the device in the first place.

One reason is that technology companies and retailers tend to have relationships that quickly turn from cooperative to competitive.

“A lot of these technology companies look like they’re great friends in the beginning, and as they grow and add products, they move from friend to foe,” said Fiona Dias, chief strategy officer of ShopRunner, an online-shopping service, and the former chief marketing officer of Circuit City.

She said that Amazon was a clear example of this, and Google, with its Wallet mobile-checkout product and its recent decision to charge retailers to be included in product searches, was another. Even Apple, with its Passbook system that allows mobile payments, and the expanding list of items sold via iTunes, should unnerve retailers that sell its products, Ms. Dias said.

Analysts also say that early on there were few alternatives to the Kindle. It was one of the first widely available e-book readers when it was introduced in 2007 for $399. Now, consumers can choose from dozens of basic black-and-white e-readers, some of them for less than $70, and a wide range of color tablets.

Wal-Mart will not order any more Kindles after its stock runs out, and Kindles will no longer be available at its Sam’s Club and walmart.com divisions along with Walmart stores, said Sarah Spencer, a spokeswoman. Wal-Mart’s decision, sent in a memo to employees, was first reported by Reuters.

Other big retailers, however, said they planned to continue carrying Kindles.

“We’ve seen good customer demand in our stores for those products,” said Jeff Haydock, a Best Buy spokesman. “Because we stand for choice, we look to bring in any of the latest technology and put it in our stores so customers can look at things, compare things and find the products that are best for them.”

At Office Depot, which added the Kindle Fire last winter, Mindy Kramer, a spokeswoman, said, “we saw this as the opportunity to really enhance our portfolio of e-readers and become a destination for these high-profile products.” Ms. Kramer added that the line’s wide range of prices appeals to shoppers.

Carrie McElwee, a Staples spokeswoman, declined to give specifics on Kindle sales or the company’s strategy with the products, but said that the store had expanded its selection as the offerings grew.

The items are also for sale at Radio Shack and at Tesco and Waterstones in Britain.

Ms. Rotman Epps said carrying Kindles fit into some retailers’ strategies, citing Best Buy’s efforts to market itself as tablet central. Ms. Dias, though, called those decisions “shortsighted.”

“They’re thinking about today’s sales,” she said. “Why support the guy that’s trying to put you out of business?”

State of the Art: More Soot Than Sparks From Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD - Review

They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.”

Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.

Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software.

The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen.

In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones.

The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 14; the larger models arrive in late November.

These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” — the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you?

Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad.

These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too — wirelessly, in fact — but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.)

The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine — more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory — twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion.

Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen — a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on — now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try.

And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.)

The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores — which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases.

Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally.

Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot.

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2012

An earlier version of this column misstated the current prices for Apple TV and for last year’s Kindle Fire. Apple TV is $100, not $80; the Kindle Fire, slightly upgraded, is $160, not $170. The column also referred incorrectly to the memory features of rival products. While the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has a memory card for expansion, the Google Nexus does not.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 14, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about Amazon.com’s new 7-inch touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, misstated its release date. It will be available today, not Sept. 24.

State of the Art: More Soot Than Sparks From Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD - Review

They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.”

Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.

Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software.

The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen.

In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones.

The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 14; the larger models arrive in late November.

These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” — the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you?

Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad.

These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too — wirelessly, in fact — but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.)

The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine — more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory — twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion.

Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen — a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on — now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try.

And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.)

The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores — which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases.

Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally.

Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot.

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2012

An earlier version of this column misstated the current prices for Apple TV and for last year’s Kindle Fire. Apple TV is $100, not $80; the Kindle Fire, slightly upgraded, is $160, not $170. The column also referred incorrectly to the memory features of rival products. While the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has a memory card for expansion, the Google Nexus does not.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 14, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about Amazon.com’s new 7-inch touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, misstated its release date. It will be available today, not Sept. 24.

State of the Art: More Soot Than Sparks From Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD - Review

They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.”

Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the iPad in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.

Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software.

The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen.

In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones.

The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 14; the larger models arrive in late November.

These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” — the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you?

Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad.

These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too — wirelessly, in fact — but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.)

The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine — more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory — twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion.

Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen — a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on — now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try.

And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.)

The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores — which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases.

Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally.

Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot.

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2012

An earlier version of this column misstated the current prices for Apple TV and for last year’s Kindle Fire. Apple TV is $100, not $80; the Kindle Fire, slightly upgraded, is $160, not $170. The column also referred incorrectly to the memory features of rival products. While the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has a memory card for expansion, the Google Nexus does not.

An earlier version of this column also misstated the date the 7-inch Fire HD becomes available. It will be ready Sept. 14, not Sept. 24.