This is a rather interesting press release I spotted this morning. Â NitroDesk the makers of TouchDown an Activesync client for Android have announced their plans to officially support Lotus Notes Traveler. Â Now Touchdown has worked well with Traveler for a while, and there have been a number of new releases since I last played with it.
NitroDesk, the makers of TouchDown, the number-one Microsoft® Exchange server synchronization solution for Android-powered devices, announce Lotus Notes support in the next release of TouchDown at the end of Q1.
System Requirements
TouchDown requires Lotus Notes to be running with Lotus Notes® Traveler. Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.2.1 and above supports Android 2.x devices. Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.2.2 and above supports Android 3.x devices.
Pricing and Availability
NitroDesk TouchDown is priced at USD 19.99 and is available for download and purchase directly on the device from Android Market. Enterprise and volume-license customers and MDM partners should contact sales@nitrodesk.com for additional pricing options. A fully functional 30-day trial version is available for download in the Android Market.
Amazon finally unveiled their much talked about Kindle Fire this morning. Finally someone understands the dynamics of the tablet market, and they have priced it correctly at $199.00. Clearly the Fire will do a good job tying in to Amazons many services, be it books, streaming music, or video, and looks like it will deliver a decent browsing experience.
The real question which has been on my mind for a while is what about Android Apps that are not available in the Amazon App Store? You see the Fire is an Android based device, but it is not the same Android you find on other tablets. Amazon is not a Google partner so they do not have access to Honeycomb (Android 3.x), so they built their own version of Android based on 2.x for the Fire. I expect that Amazon got the UI right, it will look good and be easy to use, but what if I want an App that is not in the Amazon App Store, and there are many of those.
Probably too soon to answer some or all of these questions, we will have to wait and see. I think Amazon is going to sell a lot of these tablets, especially bundled with Amazon Prime and the free video content available with Prime it is an excellent value for the price. As for me, I am not going to be the first one on my block to own one, I want to see how Android actually runs on it, and how flexible it is. I am also curious if Amazon has any plans to update these devices to an Ice Cream Sandwich based version of Android. Finally I am pleased that I have not seen any one refer to this device as “an iPad killer†(at least not yet) because it is simply not, it is clearly targeted for a different audience/purpose.
