Amazon will get the Kindle Fire sequel's chassis from Catcher Technology, says inside sources.
Isn't that typical. Just as we're getting to know our current hardware, a company has to fire up the ovens and bake an improved sequel just months after the original hit stores. It's really been no secret that Amazon pushed the first Kindle Fire out the door to beat holiday traffic, and that the company would pull out the big guns for a better tablet in 2Q12. Still, after shelling out a mere $200 just three months ago, only to see it become obsolete in mere months, is downright depressing.
Nevertheless, unnamed sources from the upstream supply chain is adding a bit of lighter fluid into the Kindle Fire 2 rumor mill, claiming that Taiwan-based chassis maker Catcher Technology has recently received orders from Amazon for a new Kindle Fire. Catcher will supposedly supply the chassis to Amazon from its plants in Taizhou, China with estimated gross margin to be more than 40-percent.
Naturally, Catcher has declined to comment about its clients. But the sources noted that Catcher will likely increase its number of CNC machines to 15,000 this year to help boost capacity and satisfy the strong demand from the tablet industry, especially the iPad.
The news follows reports that ODM orders for the Kindle Fire have been cut in half as of January, meaning that Amazon may be gearing up to flood the market with a new model. There's talk that Amazon might release two Kindle Fires in mid-2012: a refreshed 7-inch version and a larger, somewhat pricier 9-inch version. The latter model is expected to take on Apple's iPad directly whereas the former will address issues consumers had with the original model such as a lack of volume controls, a lack of an SD card slot and more.
quad core for what? what do you do in your table that you need to have a quad core SoC, i agree with progress, but we should make progress in battery life right now.
A quad core tablet is useless without the battery life to go along with it. CPU technology has always been well ahead of battery technology. It's going to start biting companies unless they start to close the gap.
Very true, we're unfortunately stuck with lithium-ion for the time being.. 6-10 hours seems to be pretty good on a tablet, at least for me. It really comes down to SOC design, and software utilization. Tegra 3 does a decent job, now they just need more software to utilize it.
Because idiots that think they might benefit from a quad core for simply looking at eBooks will buy into it.
I've been on a Dual Core desktop since 2007 and it runs all that stuff fine, and yes it runs Crysis. You don't need a Quad core tablet.
A quad core phone, I can see, since I envision the future of being able to install everything onto your phone and dock your phone somewhere. A tablet, no.
People, people... stop with the name calling already.
Same future you envision could include a tablet that you can dock somewhere, do your work on it (with the 4 cores) and then sync it with a dock. Same logic.
$20 says that there's going to be a lawsuit war soon.
Blah blah blah, cores not being used will be automatically down clocked, undervolted, or put in a sleep state, so more cores != less battery life unless software is using those cores.
Yea, Lithium ion batteries haven't seen a real energy density improvement in a long long time.
Multithreaded does not mean multiprocessor aware. I have a feeling most software on these devices are multithreaded because it's a normal way of creating software, different modules.
You don't drive innovation with yesterday's technology. Technology advances always go first, then software makers find innovative ways to make use of that technology. This is how it has always been whether we are talking about tablets, cell phones, or computers. Nobody buys a high end graphic card to play what is on the market right now, you buy it for the games that will come later on. The advanced hardware eventually opens up new technologies and innovations that weren't available previously.
With that said, I highly doubt they are going to put a quad core chip in the new $200 tablet. Maybe the higher end 9" version will have one, (at a higher end price as well), but a quad core $200 tablet is still some time away. Personally I'd rather see a lower priced full size tablet with a decent dual core chip, or at least a tablet that can do most of what a laptop can. That would easily be worth $500, but so far one doesn't exist.