Looks like the crew over at allthingd.com have gotten word that Apple will be hosting an event the first week on March. The event will be held in San Francisco, presumably at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This is the large hall that Apple announces BIG THINGS like the iPad 2 in early March last year.

We'll have to wait a bit for great clarification as we get closer to the date but expect more computing power, enhanced graphics capabilities and a higher resolution screen for great image clarity especially with small text and the like.

Still more questions than answers like...What will it be called? What resolution? How does older software look? How easily will it be to convert software to fit the new resolution? What new graphics capabilities such as 3D rendering enhancements, multi-tasking and the like.

Obviously Apple needs to continue to innovate in this space as the competitive products are maturing. Amazon's Fire fills a niche with its low powered, low cost Kindle Fire and ASUS with their high-powered Transformer Prime.

More as information starts to flow in...

Larry Pacey, award-winning designer tracks the latest news on consumer products, electronics, appliances, smart devices, networking and the gadget lifestyle.

For the latest news follow me on: ------------------------------ OR ------------------------------- Follow me on Twitter @WouldntMindThis Please comment below and share your thoughts. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to email me at wouldntmind@gmail.com. Just my 2-cents, Larry

At CES 2012 I mentioned the introduction of a new Fujifilm high-end interchangeable lens camera featuring an all-new 16 megapixel image sensor. The lenses available are all high-quality, fixed-zoom primes (18mm, 35mm and 60mm). This mid-sized camera is targeting a goal of image quality comparable to high-end digital SLR cameras.

This is not an inexpensive camera with a retail price of $1,700 for the body and lenses that range from $600-650 each!


Fujifilm is definitely targeting someone really into photography. As to where this camera fits in the universe we will have to see after I can spend more time with this new camera and get some good test shots.

You can read more from my Fujifilm X-Pro 1 hands-on at CES.

Larry Pacey, award-winning designer tracks the latest news on consumer products, electronics, appliances, smart devices, networking and the gadget lifestyle.

For the latest news follow me on: ------------------------------ OR ------------------------------- Follow me on Twitter @WouldntMindThis Please comment below and share your thoughts. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to email me at wouldntmind@gmail.com. Just my 2-cents, Larry

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the new Kindle Fire tablet. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Amazon just announced the "Kindle Fire"...a new tablet that leverages a new type of web browser called Silk.

The Amazon's Kindle Fire is a smallish tablet with a 7" display, a dual-core processor, multi-touch interface and is priced at $199. Amazon Jeff Bezos indicates that they are clearly providing a robust platform for half the price of an iPad or Android Tablets.  Now this is a tablet without a camera, microphone nor 3G connectivity, instead this platform communicates on the Whispersync of the original Kindle or wi-fi.

It is clearly a platform designed to consume content as opposed to generate it. It leverages a wi-fi connection to maintain high-speed connectivity and leverages the power of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform for computational computing muscle and storage.

The all-new Silk browser leverages the tablet and cloud computing architecture to split your web browser workload. The concept of cloud computing is something Amazon has spent a great deal of time developing. Their EC2 platform is leveraged by a great many companies today to provide web services and applications and the Kindle Fire and Silk browser take advantage of the cloud to provide predictive outcomes to speed up your web surfing efforts.

Combined, the Kindle Fire, Silk browser, a substantial library of downloadable content (music, movies, books, magazines and games) and online computing results in Amazon having built a viable platform for those seeking as simple, managed content library and online experience. All your content can be streamed to your Kindle Fire from Amazon's EC2 cloud and there are options for downloading to the device for offline access. Amazon has 17 million songs, over a million books and hundreds of magazines and 100,000 movies and TV shows. Amazon's AppStore has thousands of applications that are already compatible with the Kindle Fire as well.

All and all, a compelling package. I can definitely see a consumer demand for this product. It will be interesting to see just how much demand. Will a current Kindle consumer upgrade? Definitely looking forward to checking this out when it is commercially available starting on November 15th.

Here is some details about the Kindle's Silk browser and cloud computing architecture...