Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet

Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet

The Internet giant Amazon announced it's news tablet - Kindle Fire - yesterday morning, at an event. The long-awaited Amazon tablet is finally here, or at least will be when it ships out to consumers in early November.

cnet - Overall, the design and features place it between the traditional Kindle and iPad on the tablet spectrum, more like the Nook Color than anything else. Amazon's main advantage here is tight integration with its outstanding suite of cloud-based digital media services: 11,000 shows and movies streaming for free for Amazon Prime subscribers, 100,000 movies and TV shows to rent or purchase through Amazon Instant, and a full digital music store with cloud storage.

On the other hand, there are still quite a few question marks. It's unclear whether there will be offline support for Amazon's video services, which is important if you, say, want to watch a movie on a plane. Amazon also didn't mention any details about third-party video services like Netfilx, Hulu Plus, and MLB.TV - all of which are available on the iPad.

Kindle Fire Tablet

Here are the Kindle Fire features:

- 7-inch IPS display, 1024x600-pixel resolution at 169 dpi, Gorilla Glass

- Dual-core processor

- 512MB RAM

- 8GB internal memory

- Weights 14.6 ounces (414 grams)

- Built-in Wi-Fi

- Amazon claims "up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off"

- Tightly integrated with Amazon services like Amazon Instant Video and Cloud Drive

- Features new "cloud-accelerated" browser named Silk

- 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime

- $199, ships November 15, available for preorder today

It's obvious that Amazon is trying to get one of the lead positions in the tablet market.

Apple is going to have one serious opponent in Amazon's face.

Amazon is really trying to differentiate itself, and potentially get a leg up on Apple is by pulling a trick or two from the same playbook.

The new tablet represents a total package of what users can get on other platforms if they were to add all of the company's apps together.

Yet Amazon's also trying to create a custom user experience by including its own application store and Web browser called Silk. The Web browser is one of the key areas where Amazon can differentiate itself from Apple and other rivals, making use of its Elastic Compute Cloud technology to speed up browsing for tablet users by pre-loading some content ahead of when a user visits that page.

For the past several months Apple's begun offering something identical as part of its iCloud service, letting users re-download digital content they've purchased from its stores and sync things up between devices. There again, Amazon's competing with that strategy using its Whispersync technology, which can sync up downloads, bookmarks, notes highlights, and a user's place in books and video content.

Amazon Kindle Fire

Just last week, the company signed a streaming deal with 20th Century Fox to bring its programming to Amazon's streaming video service, one that Fire users will have out of the box. All told, that adds up to 17 million songs, 1 million books, and 100,000 movies and TV shows.The Fire also represents the first device from Amazon itself offering magazines in full-color.

Where Amazon continues to be different, however, is how it's approaching its presence on other platforms.

While users must buy an Apple product to get Apple's software, Amazon continues to offer its software and experience on other platforms, including other Android tablets.
The Fire is the company's first effort to really make that experience its own.

Watch the Kindle Fire TV Commercial:

Liverpool Seal Deal for Ajax Striker Suarez

English Premier League club Liverpool have agreed a $36 million deal with Ajax for Uruguay striker Luis Suarez.

Liverpool have been haggling with the Dutch outfit over the fee for several days but both announced on their websites that negotiations had proven successful on Friday.

The Reds have now been given permission to discuss personal terms with Suarez and will aim to complete the transfer before the European transfer window closes on January 31.

A statement on the official Ajax website read: "Ajax and Liverpool have reached an agreement over the transfer of Luis Suarez.He will make the move to the English club immediately. The deal is worth up to a total of €26.5 million ($36 million)."

Liverpool posted a statement on their website that read: "Liverpool Football Club announced this afternoon that they had agreed a fee of up to €26.5 million ($36 million) with Ajax for the transfer of Luis Suarez, subject to the completion of a medical.The club have now been given permission by Ajax to discuss personal terms with the player and his representatives."

The deal comes on the same day Liverpool revealed they had turned down a multi-million dollar offer from Chelsea for Spain striker Fernando Torres.

Natalie Portman : "I'm a Pleasure Seeker, Not Self-Punisher"

Actress Natalie Portman -- who Sunday won a Golden Globe for her performance in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" -- went method for her role as tortured ballerina Nina Sayers.

Living a role for a movie is hard work -- living the physically punishing life of a ballet dancer is even harder. But it's worth it when you get awarded with a Golden Globe for your efforts.

Though at a press conference in London she said she was more of a "pleasure-seeker" than a "self-punisher," Portman described the grueling training she underwent for the film, and how mid-way through shooting the film she suffered a dislocated rib.
"We were doing five hours a day of training that was three hours of ballet and then we would swim a mile and tone for two hours," Portman said.
"You really understand the discipline, the rigor, the willingness to work through physical pain," she explained of the physical demands on ballet dancers.

Not only did she have to train as a ballerina, she also had to embody the friable emotional state of a young girl cracking under pressure.
"I think the really tricky part was balancing the physical with the emotion," she said.

"Black Swan" is set in a fictional New York ballet company, where highly strung young women battle it out for star roles. Portman plays a corps dancer given the role of a lifetime: that of the Princess Odette in Tchaikovsky's classic ballet, Swan Lake.
But not only does her character have to portray the good princess Odette, who is turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer; she also plays the sorcerer's daughter Odile, the black swan of the film's title.

Dancing as the two swans proves psychologically unsettling for Sayers, a good girl required to turn bad for the role of Odile. She is goaded by the ballet company director (played by French actor Vincent Cassel) into exploring her dark side for the role.

Portman explained that she was drawn to the world of ballet, which she sees as "a particularly female art form that is still dominated by men," because she wanted to represent the "larger world of women, you know, where one woman gets too old, or out of shape, and there's a younger woman that's going to be slipped into her place."
Exploring that world is fitting for an actress used to working in Hollywood since childhood.

Portman was born in 1981 in Jerusalem and moved to America soon after. She made her acting debut in 1994 as Mathilda Luc Besson's film "Leon," about the relationship between a young girl and a hit man.

Portman, now 29, said she was pleased to have had the experience of her 20's before embarking on the demanding role of Nina. She likens her experience as a child actress to that of her character in "Black Swan."

With a Golden Globe win, many are wondering if Portman will get an Academy Award nomination too.
But while she says she finds the awards buzz "flattering," Portman also said that audience reaction is most important to her.

"Just to see people engaging so passionately about it is your greatest dream while making a movie," she said.