Amazon has a habit of launching new tablets in the fall… and blogger Dave Zatz has a habit of spotting upcoming Amazon products at the FCC website, in spite of Amazon’s efforts to hide its FCC listings.
So maybe it’s not surprising that Zatz has spotted what he thinks could be an FCC posting for a new Fire tablet.
Amazon typically registers products under a shell company to make it tougher to spot unannounced products before they’re unveiled. But the company has a habit of naming those companies in interesting ways, using PO boxes and VoIP phone numbers, and generally creating companies that don’t look like real companies.
The end result? While I’ve never quite figured out how he does it, Zatz has successfully managed to find a number of FCC listings for Amazon products before they’re announced, including the Fire Phone, Amazon Dash buttons, and the Fire TV, just to name a few.
So when Zatz says the SG98EG from Jib Wresh LLC (say it aloud… it’s gibberish… literally) is a Fire tablet, there’s a pretty good chance he’s right.
There aren’t many other details about the tablet… other than the fact that it’s the first Fire tablet to feature a microSD card slot. That’s a bit surprising, since Amazon has typically encouraged owners of its tablets to stream videos from Amazon Instant Video, music from Amazon MP3 and Amazon Prime Music, and generally use their devices for streaming rather than storing media. But either the company’s had a change of heart, or maybe the microSD card is only included for testing purposes and the consumer model won’t include a removable storage option.
Or maybe this just isn’t a Fire tablet. Of course, if it isn’t, there’s a good chance it’s something interesting. It’s unlikely anybody would name their company Jib Wresh unless they were up to something.
Maybe it is the Fire Phone 2 in disguise.Seriously……….
This is a sensible move. I think there’s still a decent segment of the market who uses stored media instead of cloud. Home internet providers are installing data caps, cellular providers aren’t raising theirs anytime soon, and families are now buying devices for every family member. Offline storage is becoming a necessity.
We just took the kids on a vacation four hours away. Both watched movies and shows on their old Archos 70 250gb tablets, and both were happy in the car. At DVD quality, that would have been about 3.5gb of data one way, with horrible reception during a couple segments of the trip.
Pffft. If there’s removable storage on this POS, you can be sure you can’t store anything on it UNLESS you store it on Amazon’s Cloud first.
Looks like desperate times at Amazon call for desperate measures.
Their tablets aren’t selling well anymore. Amazon likely has a list
of consumer objections to their tablets, and lack of removable
external storage is probably high on the list. Trying to force cloud
storage onto consumers by not having a microSD slot hasn’t taken
off for any number of reasons. To address the sales slowdown,
Amazon is probably addressing the objections one by one, until
sales pick up sufficiently. Maybe eventually they’ll do a Blackberry
and port pure Android. By then it could be too late as a protracted
price war will break out, with combo Android/Windows tablets (with
loads of RAM, internal storage, plus microSD slots) ruling the roost.
Here’s hoping Amazon follows this path for the Fire Phone too. Google
are you listening?
Maybe they’re looking for a way to allow more downloads of media. They used to allow it to PCs using a program I think was called Unbox or something. Movies take up a lot of space.