KINDLE FIRE STOPS BLOCKING ANDROID MARKET

Some of you may have noticed, when perusing the interwebs on your Kindle Fire, that a certain Google-branded Market refused to load in the slate's Silk browser. In fact, it automatically redirected you to the Amazon App store in an unsettling bit of URL hijacking. Well, with the latest update to the tablet, that slightly befuddling restriction has been lifted and the questionable behavior rectified. Presumably this was originally intended to save customers confusion and support staff headaches when trying to install an app from the Android Market failed. But, actually intercepting and redirecting a user isn't becoming of a company that expects us to trust it with our data -- especially our browsing and financial info. Thankfully now, you can visit the Market in all its glory on your Fire, just don't expect to install apps from it any time soon

AMAZON UNVEILS NEW TABLET AND TOUCHSCREEN E-READERS

Amazon this morning launched new touchscreen e-readers as well as the much talked about Kindle Fire tablet. The readers will use infrared touch, which puts an infrared touch screen over e-ink. The screens appear to be roughly the same size as the current crop of Kindle e-readers. The e-readers will come in three flavors, two having touchscreens. The 3G will be $149, the WiFi only will be $99 and the non-touch version will be $79. According to an Amazon rep these prices are for the ad supported versions and the Wifi only and non-touch version without ads will be $149 and $109 respectively.

In addition to the new e-readers, a software update was also announced. Some of the new features include X-ray, which allows users to quickly look up words, get character synopsis and location information directly from the ebook. WhisperSync was also beefed to make it quicker.

Finally, Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire. The Fire is Amazon's new 7" IPS touchscreen tablet that runs a customized version of the Android OS. It has a dual core processor, weighs 14.6 ounces and comes with free Amazon cloud storage. The browser for the Fire will be the Amazon Silk which is a new hybrid browser with part residing on the tablet and the other part on the cloud server. The Fire will retail for $199.

No mention was made on the rumored 10" tablet Amazon is expected to unveil sometime in the first quarter of 2012.

BENDABLE DISPLAYS MADE FROM SILK

We have all shuddered at the thought of sitting on our rigid display devices and cracking them in half. Now Taiwanese researchers have found a way to make the display more bendable by using silk. The researchers take what is called liquid silk and turn it into an insulating membrane that is then used to make the TFT, or thin-film transistor, display found in both e-readers and LCD panels.

The advantage of the process is much more resilient e-reader panels. The best part is it is actually cheaper than the current technology for making TFT displays with the component cost for the silk coming in at about three cents per display.