Tech Thursday – Apple, Amazon.

July 12, 2012

As the big holiday shopping season is looming companies across America and the world are busy making sure that their product lines are ready to maximize profits during the upcoming holiday season.  Apple Inc. has always been know to make some new exciting product available for the holiday season, which always end up generating great revenue for the company. With the recent announcements of the new retina display MacBookPro, an upgrade to MacBook air line, and new iOS6, during Apple’s WWDC last June in San Francisco,  many believe that this Fall Apple Inc. will introduce the iPhone 5 which will make the long awaited upgrade to the iPhone lineup a guaranteed holiday season blockbuster.

However, there has been a lot of recent chatter about a new, smaller and cheaper iPad that Apple is working on as a step to continue dominance in the Tablet market even when Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet are released. It was announced by Microsoft recently that Windows 8 will be available later in October, and with it the new tablets will also hit the shelves. If Apple is seriously worried about the Windows 8 tablet this might lead them to push more effort towards releasing the new iPad version this holiday season, if one is indeed in the works.

If indeed a smaller and cheaper iPad is in the works, this would have more significance to it than battling Microsoft. Steve Jobs stated several time while he was Apple’s CEO that the current screen size for the iPad is the optimal size and that Apple will not release smaller iPads.  So if Apple will release a smaller and cheaper iPad, that might be the first step that Apple would make in the post Steve Jobs era that could be seen as a change in approach from the one it’s previous long time CEO used to run the company by.

Another company that has been mentioned  in the news recently with ties to the smartphone industry is Amazon. Some started to speculate that Amazon was considering to enter the smartphone business by making their own phone. It appears that an Amazon smartphone would be a great fit for the company, however no official word about that was made by Amazon as of yet. What amazon is doing today though is launching their new cloud gaming platform called Game Connect. This will allow Amazon to add a massive new selection of multilayer online and free games. Amazon is also reported to open the Game Connect platform to developers so they could integrate their games with Amazon’s existing game accounts. This could be just another sign that Amazon does have plans to join the smartphone race and make their own smartphone eventually.