Good news for Amazon Prime members: Amazon.com has signed a deal with Viacom that gives its Amazon Prime Instant Video service access to a lot more stuff–from Jersey Shore to Dora the Explorer. It now offers more than 15,000 streaming videos to Prime members at no additional charge.

Netflix seems to be shy about disclosing the number of streaming videos it has–its FAQ just says “thousands”–but Roku’s site says it’s “over 20,000″ and I’ve also seen a figure of 25,000 quoted. In either case, Amazon Prime, which started out a year ago with just 5,000 titles, appears to be closing in.

But Amazon still isn’t quite marketing it as a Netflix archival. The video streaming is a freebie for those of us who pay $79 for discounted shipping of physical products, not a standalone service with a standalone price tag. That lets it float under the radar and makes it sound like a bountiful bonus rather than a skimpy selection.

My guess is that at some point, Amazon will start treating Prime Instant Video like it wants to take on Netflix in a seriously manner. That’ll presumably involve offering it at a similar (or lower?) monthly price.

The logical time to do so is when the catalogs have roughly the same quantity of movies and TV shows. I wonder if it’ll happen by the end of this year?

The new Amazon.com Kindles–the Fire and Touch–are out, and Black Friday has come and gone. Amazon is delighted with how well they sold:

“Even before the busy holiday shopping weekend, we’d already sold millions of the new Kindle family and Kindle Fire was the bestselling product across all of Amazon.com. Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family – customers purchased 4X as many Kindle devices as they did last Black Friday – and last year was a great year,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “In addition, we’re seeing a lot of customers buying multiple Kindles – one for themselves and others as gifts – we expect this trend to continue on Cyber Monday and through the holiday shopping season.”

Four times last year’s sales, eh? Impressive! But we don’t really know how impressive, since Amazon never disclosed how many Kindles it sold last year. The company keeps bragging about its e-reader sales without ever mentioning numbers.

2010 example:

“We’re grateful to the millions of customers who have made the all-new Kindle the bestselling product in the history of Amazon — surpassing Harry Potter 7,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. “We’re seeing that many of the people who are buying Kindles also own an LCD tablet. Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies, and web browsing and their Kindles for reading sessions. They report preferring Kindle for reading because it weighs less, eliminates battery anxiety with its month-long battery life, and has the advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display that reduces eye-strain, doesn’t interfere with sleep patterns at bedtime, and works outside in direct sunlight, an important consideration especially for vacation reading. Kindle’s $139 price point is a key factor — it’s low enough that people don’t have to choose.”

2009:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that November is already the best sales month ever for Kindle, even before Cyber Monday. Kindle continues to be the most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon. The latest generation Kindle – just released in October – is $259 and available for immediate shipment today at www.amazon.com/kindle.

Earlier in 2009:

Amazon.com today announced that more new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch, making the new Kindles the fastest-selling ever. In addition, in the four weeks since the introduction of the new Kindle and Kindle 3G, customers ordered more Kindles on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product, continuing Kindle’s over two-year run as the bestselling product across all the products sold on Amazon.com. The new Kindles started shipping to customers today–two days earlier than previously announced.

…and so on. Always with the triumphant claims about best-sellerhood, but never any specific figures that would allow us to judge for ourselves.

When I wrote about this before, I wondered why Amazon wasn’t forthcoming with hard data. At the time, I thought maybe it was because e-readers were a relatively small product category compared to blockbusters like the iPod. Perhaps Amazon didn’t want to point that out. But with the arrival of the Kindle Fire, I’m dying to know something very specific: How do its sales compare to those of the iPad?

Apple doesn’t always disclose sales figures for its products. As far as I know, though, it doesn’t issue press releases trumpeting their success without large numbers to back up the bragging. For instance, we know that it sold 300,000 units of the original iPad on its first day. But we don’t know whether the Kindle Fire sold in that ballpark, or much less. (I’m assuming we would know if it outsold the iPad. But maybe not.)

I can’t think of anything comparable to Amazon’s ongoing celebration of Kindle sales without any disclosure of what they actually are. It’s clear that Kindles sell well. But until the company fesses up, I’ll always have the sneaking suspicion that they might not be selling quite as well as some people think.

Or as Steve Jobs put it in a 2009 interview with David Pogue, “Usually if you sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”

[Image courtesy of Bigstock.]

I wondered why no company has taken up the challenge of building…well, the iPhone of Android phones. Something that’s elegant, approachable, uncluttered, and respectful of the consumer’s intelligence. Any bundled services would need to be beautifully integrated rather than just shoveled onto the phone indiscriminately, as the apps on Android handsets often are.

And then it hit me: Why not Amazon?

Amazon is good at making things simple. Amazon has taste. Amazon has stores for movies, music, books, magazines, and apps, all of which are already hooked up to our credit cards and shipping addresses.

Most important, Amazon has already done a lot of the heavy lifting required to build a phone. It could simply repurpose much of the effort it’s poured into the Kindle Fire tablet, and then add phone-specific features.

As long as I’m daydreaming: Couldn’t Amazon buy wireless service in bulk from someone like Sprint or Verizon, then resell it in a form that’s designed to be as hassle-free as possible? (Wouldn’t it be cool to sign up for a wireless plan with pricing that was utterly free of mysterious charges?)

I’m not saying that a Kindle Fire phone would be an antidote to Android fragmentation. Actually, if it’s like the Kindle Fire tablet, it would be one of the most fragmented Android phones of all, since Amazon would utterly rework the operating system to serve its purposes. But the Kindle Fire, with its simpler interface and deeply-integrated services, is fragmentation with a point, rather than the random, unsatisfying fragmentation that otherwise pervades Android.

I have no reason to believe that Amazon is planning to make a Kindle phone. Then again, I’d be startled if it hadn’t at least pondered the possibility. I’d consider buying one–would you?

If it’s a cheap tablet you’re after, Barnes & Noble and Amazon want your business. Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s $249 Nook Tablet both look promising on paper—the former with its suite of Amazon services, and latter with its superior specs and more diverse streaming video offerings—but chances are, you’ve only got room for one tablet on your holiday wish list.

As is often the case with gadgets, finding the best 7-inch tablet is a matter of figuring out your personal needs. Below, I’ll divvy up the strengths of the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire so you can figure out what’s most important.

Apps

The Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire both have app stores, but Amazon’s tablet has a bigger selection. Its gaming library, in particular, is much more diverse, with categories for RPGs, strategy games, shooters and more, whereas the Nook focuses mostly on lighter fare. The Amazon Appstore also offers more free apps, and gives away one paid app every day.

Advantage: Kindle Fire

Streaming Media

Netflix is integrated with the Nook Tablet, pushing recommendations to the user’s home screen, and Hulu Plus is pre-loaded, making Barnes & Noble’s tablet a strong streaming video device. Although the Kindle Fire has its own streaming video service through Amazon Prime, it’s only ideal for people who already subscribe to the $79-per-year service for something else, be it the limited book rental library or free two-day shipping. For everyone else, the Nook Tablet’s video services have a better selection and wider availability on other devices, such as smartphones and game consoles. Streaming music is a toss-up, with both tablets offering apps for Pandora, MOG and Rhapsody. (UPDATE: The Kindle Fire will be getting a Netflix app at launch. I’m still giving the edge to the Nook Tablet for now for its Hulu Plus support.)

Advantage: Nook Tablet

Reading

The Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet hit all the same feature checkboxes for e-reading. Both devices offer millions of e-books, plus newspapers and magazines. For parents, the Nook Tablet gets a slight edge for its “Read and Record” capability, which lets you record your own story narrations, but Amazon Prime members will prefer the Kindle Fire for its selection of free e-book rentals. Comic book fans will be divided; the Nook Tablet will have graphic novels from Marvel, while the Kindle Fire has a deal with DC.

Advantage: Toss-Up

On-Demand Media

No contest here. The Kindle Fire will let you purchase or rent videos on demand, and includes access to Amazon’s MP3 store. Best of all, any content you purchase from Amazon is stored online for free, so you won’t have to worry about wasting storage space on the device. The Nook Tablet doesn’t have a way to let you buy music and video on the device, so you’ll have to bring your own content from elsewhere.

Advantage: Kindle Fire

Straight-Up Specs
Although the Nook Tablet is $50 more expensive than the Kindle Fire, you get your money’s worth in raw power. Barnes & Noble’s slate has twice the RAM at 1 GB and twice the built in storage at 16 GB, plus a microSD card slot for even more storage. Otherwise, the two tablets have similar specs, including dual-core processors and 7-inch, 1024-by-600 resolution displays. If you plan to hack either tablet to run a pure version of Android, the Nook Tablet’s extra RAM will be worth the extra scratch, but either way, its generous storage will come in handy.

Advantage: Nook Tablet

Little Details and Intangibles

Specs and features only go so far. Both tablets look good on paper, but either one could be buggy, laggy, unresponsive or otherwise broken at launch. And although Barnes & Noble brags about how the Nook Tablet is lighter than Amazon’s Kindle Fire, the two have very similar proportions, so the difference really comes down to how each one feels in your hands.

Barnes & Noble has one more advantage in its ability to offer free support, free Wi-Fi and special offers for Nook Tablet owners at its retail stores. Amazon, meanwhile, plays to its own strength in web services. The Kindle Fire offers free cloud storage for purchased content, and includes a web browser called Silk that taps Amazon’s web servers to load pages faster. I’m not going to pick a winner or categorically declare one tablet better than the other—at least not until I’ve tried both of them in finished form.

[This post republished from Techland.]

Surprisingly, it took two booksellers / digital content companies to figure out there’s a market for smaller, less expensive tablets that focus on key consumer activities. The Fire and Nook may not be computer replacements, but for most people, neither is the iPad, yet it’s easily outselling comparable Android tablets by a large margin according to the limited data available.

Amazon’s bringing free Kindle e-book rentals to Amazon Prime members, but a bunch of restrictions make the service less attractive than it could be.

The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, as it’s officially called, lets Amazon Prime members check out one book at a time in one-month increments. If the member switches to another book when a month is over, the old book disappears from the device. Amazon Prime costs $79 per year, and also includes free two-day shipping on retail items, $3.99 overnight shipping and, as of last February, free streaming movies and TV shows.

Certainly, the addition of e-book rentals makes Amazon Prime an enticing service, but take note of the fine print, as reported by the Wall Street Journal: The service is not available through Kindle apps on non-Amazon devices, so you can’t read lent e-books on iPhones, iPads or Android devices. Amazon hopes the lending service will drive people to its Kindle e-readers and upcoming Kindle Fire tablet.

Also, Amazon’s e-book lending program only includes about 5,000 e-books. Although the rental selection includes more than 100 past and current New York Times best sellers, the six largest U.S. publishers aren’t participating. As you might expect, they’re afraid an e-book subscription service would cut into book sales and hurt their relationships with other book sellers.

Still, I’m glad someone is pursuing the “Netflix of books” concept. If major publishers some day come around, and if a competitor—say, Barnes & Noble—can bring e-book subscriptions to more devices than its own hardware, this idea could take off.

To access the rentals, select the “Kindle Owners’ Lending Libary” category in the store on a Kindle device, or look for the “borrow for free” option on individual e-book pages.

[This post republished from Techland.]

The Kindle Fire is powered by Android, but it’s been heavily customized by Amazon to the point where you can barely tell. By purchasing the remnants of Palm, Amazon would have free rein to redesign webOS to its own liking, and it would be able to further differentiate its Kindle devices from the slew of Android tablets in the market.

It would be swell if the WebOS saga ended happily, and I can’t think of a better candidate than Amazon to figure out how to do well by the software. Then again, I once thought that HP could be a good home for it, too…

I may be indulging in wishful thinking, but there’s a possibility that ten years from now we’ll look back on Silk as the single most important thing in today’s announcement.