Online retail giant Amazon is readying its Kindle Fire 2 tablet for the festive period and it could sport a larger 8.9-inch display.

If you’re already thinking about Christmas then firstly, shame on you, but secondly, Amazon may have the answer to your gift-giving conundrums.

The news comes via a Reuters source, who claims “Amazon plans to launch a new tablet closer to the holiday season later this year”.

About to set the tablet market alight?

It’s been suggested that the increase in screen size is an attempt by Amazon to challenge Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad range, which currently dominates the market.

However the Amazon Kindle Fire offers a simple, budget option for those US consumers unable to stump up the cash for the extravagant new iPad or even the iPad 2.

The Kindle Fire 2 is expected to make the dash across the pond and land in the UK and the rest of Europe, with hopefully the same low price tag, as Amazon looks to take on the worldwide market.

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PayPal has told TechRadar that it is “flattered” that the likes of Barclay’s Pingit and the O2 Wallet have arrived as competitors to an app that it launched in 2008.

Pingit and the O2 Wallet are garnering large amounts of attention, partly courtesy of big money advertising campaigns, and TechRadar asked the company how it felt about the high-profile new launches.

“It’s very interesting for a number of reasons,” PayPal’s Rob Skinner told TechRadar, “First of all it’s very flattering that people are starting to shout about something that we’ve been doing for years.

“Pingit is a great example of that. It basically does what our app has done since 2008.

“We launched as Apple launched the App Store, it was there almost on day one and that’s forwarding money to other people.

“That was the original idea of PayPal, believe it or not, back in 1998, to beam money to each other on Palm Pilots.

“It is quite flattering and people are suddenly waking up to the fact that there is this thing called mobile which we were set up to do in the first place.”

A big task

Skinner believes that the new arrivals will face a huge task – namely getting enough people on board to hit ‘critical mass’ and force retailers to adopt the new technology.

“The really interesting bit is: how you do these things? New entries have a challenge in that when you set up something from scratch, be it person-to-person payments or using a phone to make payments in store, you’ve got to have the critical mass of people.

“The other challenge is that if you are thinking about using a new wallet online or on the high street you’ve got to explain to retailers why it’s worth taking that payment method.

“They aren’t going to do it unless there are enough consumers to make it worth their while.

“If you go back to credit cards – the first one – Barclaycard was back in the 60s, but Marks and Spencers didn’t start taking credit cards until 1989.”

“That retailer will only take new payment method if they are losing out by not taking it.

“We’ve been on that slow journey. You can now buy on JohnLewis.com with PayPal, and that’s because they could see the benefit.”

Critical mass

Skinner believes that PayPal is well beyond the point of critical mass, and that it is now continuing down the route of making its service ubiquitous.

“We have 50 million active users in the UK so we no longer quote total account holders,” he added. “It’s a bit like how many MySpace users there are! The accounts we quote are active.

“We’ve never gone in for a big advertising push, and I think the fact that other people are pushing their products this hard is an example of how desperately they need to hit that critical mass.

“From a consumer’s perspective they aren’t going to be using a new way of payment unless it offers something that’s much better than the current way that they use.”

“For us it’s about putting PayPal in new places and websites – like John Lewis.”

Flexible OLED displays could be making their way to our gadgets sooner rather than later as Samsung has seen “huge” orders for the bendy screens.

Samsung Electronics’ vice chairman Kwon Oh-hyun told Korea Times that demand is high for the futuristic OLEDs, with mass production beginning in late 2012:

“We will be mass producing flexible OLED displays from the latter half of this year as the demand from our clients is significant,” he said.

“OLEDs will replace LCDs as the main mobile displays from around 2015 as the screens are thinner and brighter. Samsung has massively invested in OLED-related technologies and will continue to do so.”

Flex that screen

The flexi-tech, which Samsung showed off in December, lends itself to smaller mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, rather than TVs (although we are looking forward to the day we can afford Samsung’s delicious 55-inch OLED TV which is getting a release in the second half of the year).

Some analysts have taken the attention-grabbing stance that Samsung’s faith in the flexible OLED displays must surely come from some interest from Apple, mooting that we could see bendable, posable iPhones and iPads in the years to come.

But, to be fair, you don’t really need Apple to put a vote of confidence behind the idea of a foldable, near-indestructible mobile display. That sounds cool enough on its own.

Google is reportedly planning on giving up to five mobile makers early access to Android 5.0 (otherwise known as Jelly Bean) rather than focusing on just one flagship Nexus device.

This new plan, which the Wall Street Journal has on good authority from people familiar with the matter, will see a portfolio of Nexus devices launch at once, including both smartphones and tablets.

At the moment, Google uses just one manufacturer (most recently Samsung) to create a flagship Nexus device with the new version of Android on board (currently Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich).

Googley eyes

The problem is that it then takes other manufacturers a good few months to bring out similar hardware that makes the most of the software.

This change in strategy could see each iteration of Android have a bigger impact than the current method which trickles updates out as and when.

Google’s other problem is that Android manufacturers are wary of its plans for Motorola, so giving them all early access to the software at once could calm their fears.

The search giant is also apparently planning on selling the handsets directly rather than relying on networks – so you’ll only be able to buy an unlocked, SIM-free handset from Google and possibly some retailers in Europe, Asia and the US.

It’s a plan that makes a fair amount of sense. But we think sticking with the Nexus name across all devices is less likely given that it’s more of a stand-alone product name than a brand.

But hey, anything’s possible – and we won’t know for sure until Google breaks its silence, possibly at this year’s Google I/O in June.

Look out! The browser wars are back! That’s what analysts at Macquarie Capital reckon, anyway: in a note titled “The Browser Wars Part Deux” they suggest that “Google Chrome Browser for iOS is Coming”.

It may well be. Will anyone bar a few Google fans care?

My guess is no.

Macquarie makes several arguments for Chrome on iOS, and I reckon one of them is right and the rest are wrong. I’ll start with the right one first: a Chrome browser on iOS could reduce the amount of cash Google has to give Apple for all those Mobile Safari search queries. That’s true, but the other arguments – that Chrome did well on PC so it can do well on iOS, and that Chrome ads really shifted copies on PC so they’ll do the same on iOS, that reviews of Chrome on Android are quite positive – don’t spell Safari Killer to me.

Macquarie rightly says that Chrome on the desktop has done very well and reduced the money Google pays out to other browser makers for searches, which is significant: Firefox only lives because of Google search money. However, iOS isn’t the same as 1990s-era Windows, and when Macquarie says that “there are many parallels to the browser wars of the late 1990s” I think they’re wrong.

That was then, this is now

People jumped from Netscape to Internet Explorer (and back again) for all kinds of reasons, but the main reason Internet Explorer triumphed in the first browser war was because Microsoft stuck it into every copy of Windows. If history’s repeating, then Google is on the losing side here: it’s trying to get a foothold on somebody else’s OS, an OS that already ships with a perfectly good browser.

Even if you can get iOS users to download the app, it won’t work properly. As Kevin Tofel rightly says on GigaOM, with rival browsers “none of them can be set as the default browser, meaning all links in emails, texts or other apps will always open in Safari, regardless of what other browsers are installed.”

Unlike the late 1990s, we’re also dealing with relatively mature web technologies nowadays. Firms aren’t sticking new features into their browsers and letting a million “best viewed with” icons bloom; today’s battlegrounds are standards support and JavaScript performance.

I’m not convinced Google can beat Apple in the speed stakes, and the features Chrome on Android has that Safari doesn’t – bookmark and tab syncing, a combined address and search bar and easy private browsing – are hardly earth-shattering or hard to duplicate.

Browsers become popular because other browsers fall out of favour. Internet Explorer was overtaken by Firefox because Microsoft effectively stopped developing it, leaving plenty of room for a better browser; Firefox was overtaken by Chrome because it was getting slow and old while Chrome was blisteringly fast. For Chrome to do well on iOS it really needs Apple to really mess up Safari. How likely is that?