The iPad was widely criticised at first for its Noddy home screen; there were no software or hardware concessions made regarding multitasking or task-switching. But the result is something my two-year-olds can easily navigate, and which really doesn’t need a manual.

via Samsung’s lovely illegal tablet: Why no one wants to know • The Register.

To which I’d add that most apps I’ve downloaded that have required reference to any sort of instructions have rapidly found themselves in the disused folder.

So there’s the fact that your 2 year old and your Gran can use it. Sure it’s got the grunt of a desktop machine from a decade ago but you can get apps that do more than my first (Pentium 100 Windows 95) PC ever did*, and more intuitively. Without instructions. The software-becomes-the-device.

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*I still get the heebees thinking about how I struggled to get Cubase on that old PC to do more than any four-track cassette could have at the time..

“We’re not positive that some respondents didn’t confuse Amazon the manufacturer (Kindle) and Amazon the reseller ” – Retrevo

And that could just be the edge that Amazon needs. They have the best … what do they call it … vertical integration

You can’t seriously argue that Apple’s design>build>sell>support mobile strategy isn’t working for them so far, but to me the interesting question that’ll be answered when the dust settles, is how “open” or “closed” of an ecosystem would the Amazon offering have to be in order to effectively compete with Apple. Google’s version of Android is .. well it depends who you read but I’m not convinced the entirely ‘open-ish’ way is working yet. But then it’s not Google’s core business, and they’ve shown little interest or ability with hardware so far.

If Amazon took it upon themselves to invest smartly in polishing up the Android ‘experience’ on their own hardware, the fact they already have a large audience of consumers that already trust them and their sales channel (something much closer to a bricks-and-mortar store than the more nebulous Google has ever been) could give them the edge they need. They’d be like budget Apple, without the snazzy shop fronts. It’s not hard – they just have to come up with an ecosystem-in-a-box that works for the user as well as it does for the company.

$5 says this is the thing – the next-iPad-killer – that Apple is most likely to be actually looking over their shoulder at. Interesting Times.