Good and Bad News in Tablets and Power

New reports find a single-core, color Amazon Inc. Kindle in the wild replete with integration points to leverage the company's rich physical and cloud-based product delivery systems. Elsewhere, Google Inc. has declared war on Android fragmentation, though its plans improving the ecosystem for developers, manufacturers, and users remain incomplete. Google also detailed its energy consumption efficiencies as a bankrupt solar cell manufacturer finds itself embroiled in an FBI investigation.

Focal Points:

• Further proof materialized this week signaling the arrival of a color Amazon tablet for the holiday season this year. A TechCrunch reporter claims to have spent time with a 7-inch, Design Verification Testing unit of the new Amazon Kindle. Though it is based on Android, Amazon built the upcoming Kindle on a completely forked version of Android thought to be older than 2.2 and has removed Google's Android Market in favor of the Amazon Android AppStore. Most of Amazon's Internet-enabled services are integrated into the device, including facilities for obtaining and viewing Amazon's book, movie, and music content. Kindle buyers will receive free subscriptions to Amazon Prime to further entice purchases. Lacking somewhat in the storage department with a mere 6 gigabytes (GBs) onboard, Amazon's intention is for this Kindle to be rely heavily on its cloud service offerings for storage and playback. The Kindle will lack any carrier network connectivity at launch, though Amazon is reportedly hoping to change that next year.
• As Amazon is on the cusp of offering another fragmented version of an Android tablet, Google is working to end issues related to application compatibility. More than 50 percent of Android users run the 2.2 version of the operating system and more than 30 percent are running the most recent 2.3 version, leaving almost 20 percent on versions 2.1 and older. Google says the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich update will consolidate hardware and application specifications making application compatibility – and future hardware variations – less of an issue. In addition to issues related to application compatibility, a new survey of 75 Android application developers finds that platform monetization is far less than with Apple Inc.'s iOS platform. Developers cite piracy as one the main culprits given the ease of copying and republishing an Android application, along with lax Android Market policies. To help hardware manufacturers keep Apple lawsuits at bay, Google has sold nine patents to HTC Corp. and provided them with ammunition to fight the claims and launch a countersuit against Apple.
• For the first time ever, Google released information about how much energy is consumed by its data centers worldwide. According to the Internet search giant, the company continuously consumed 260 million watts of power in 2010 – enough to power between 100,000 and 200,000 homes in a typical city. The company says that the average user consumes about 180 watt-hours per month, the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours, to power Google searches, Gmail messaging, and YouTube videos. Advertisements displayed on those pages and others that use Google's advertisement services are also included in that figure. The company estimated carbon emissions at 1.5 metric tons for 2010 and has committed to increasing its usage of renewable energy from 25 percent to 30 percent in 2011. While Google is proud of its energy fortunes, the situation for Solandra LLC, a developer and manufacturer of solar cells, is getting worse after having filed for bankruptcy protection last week. The company had its Fremont, CA offices raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to execute a search warrant issued as part of a joint operation between the Department of Energy and that department's inspector general. The company still has some staff at its offices as it tries to sell off all or part of its intellectual property. It had received $527 million in government loans and $69 million in private investment.

Experton Group believes Hewlett-Packard, Co.'s failures with the Touchpad, and later success in selling the tablet at discount prices, have proven the appetite for tablets other than the iPad. Tablet manufacturers need to get three things right in their product mix: pricing, product usability, and the supporting ecosystem. While HP had only one of those criteria with its “fire sale” pricing, the upcoming Amazon Kindle's $250 price tag and deep integration into the company's rich purchasing options are most viable argument to buy from a non-Apple vendor yet. Amazon has demonstrated its willingness to sell its hardware at a loss to support the brand and its infrastructure offerings, though enterprise-oriented offerings are not on the horizon and the old version of Android employed may limit application compatibility.

For Google, the arrival of a color Kindle is a double-edged sword. The Kindle flies in the face of Google's efforts to eliminate Android fragmentation and the company is historically terrible at making those types of promises a reality. Google has an uphill battle ahead of it given developer and user criticisms of compatibility and market offerings; and IT executives remain better off using iPads given the consistency of the Apple ecosystem and infrastructure.

Nonetheless, Google is trying to protect its ecosystem by making good on its promise to help Android manufacturers stave off lawsuits by acquiring patents. Google's declaration of energy usage is intended to gain recognition of its accomplishments despite the fact that their high consumption is roughly one-quarter the output of a nuclear power plant. For the amount of data it serves, Google's energy efficiency is stellar and IT executives could learn a lot regarding efficiencies including specialized operations that use energy-saving software and pod-based data center builds.

Solandra's woes may be a sign of the times given Chinese manufacturers' virtual takeover of the solar cell manufacturing market. The reasons for the FBI raid remain unclear as of this writing, but the federal government certainly wants deeper insight into what happened with what it had previously thought was one of the most promising companies in the field and its loans.

IT executives should be working to adopt both energy saving and renewable energy strategies into their power plans as investment paybacks are becoming increasingly attractive financially and strategically.