As expected, Amazon today launched the Kindle Fire, its own Android-powered 7-inch tablet (available to pre-order ahead of a November 15th release). At just $199 the device is even more aggressively priced than the $250 mooted by TechCrunch a few weeks ago. It’s clear that Amazon’s strategy is not to make lots of money selling the hardware but to use it to sell more e-books, MP3s, apps, films and other digital content. It’s this that makes it significant for Android developers – if things play out how Amazon intends, we should see a big increase in sales on the Amazon Appstore.

It’s striking how Amazon has completely down-played the Android underpinnings of its new machine. The word “Android” appears only once on the product page and only then as part of the name “Amazon Appstore for Android”. The Kindle Fire doesn’t look much like an Android device either. This is not a Google-endorsed, Honeycomb-powered tablet. In fact, according to TechCrunch, it runs a fork of Froyo (Android 2.2). Inevitably this adds to Android fragmentation concerns. It remains to be seen whether Amazon will release an emulator image to enable developers to test for this environment.

For now the Kindle Fire is disappointingly but unsurprisingly a US-only proposition. A wider launch of the Amazon Appstore could be imminent and it seems reasonable to expect that the Kindle Fire might follow sometime in 2012.

In my previous post, I concluded that Amazon’s Appstore for Android was an underwhelming proposition for developers and would probably remain so, at least until Amazon’s mooted Android tablets surfaced. Details of a Kindle-branded 7″ Android tablet have now started to appear, with M.G. Siegler on TechCrunch claiming to have actually used the device. Based on his report, it seems Amazon intends to diverge further from Google’s template than any major Android device manufacturer has done so far (Mark Murphy ponders what this means for developers).

Perhaps the most significant detail is the rumoured price point. At $250 (~£154) it will be half the price of an iPad. This thing is likely to sell. And when it sells, app sales should follow.

I suspect the device will initially be available in the US only as this is Amazon’s usual strategy when launching new products and services, and the Appstore itself is US-only at present.

Here’s hoping that, to ensure app compatibility, Amazon decides to send free development devices to those loyal Android developers who have been with its Appstore since launch.

Following the unfortunate demise of Jeff Atwood and Phil Haack’s blogs, the resultant schadenfreude on Reddit, and Jeff’s subsequent discussion of StackOverflow’s back-up process, I’m going to share with you everything that I know about back-up procedures. This won’t be a long post, I’m not a sysadmin.

You might keep frequent on-site back-ups to reduce the inconvenience of routine problems such as hardware failure, but it’s the off-site back-ups that ultimately determine how resilient you are in the face of real problems (fire, flood, etc.).  In that final analysis only the off-site back-ups matter. Making more, or more frequent, on-site back-ups will not help if your off-site back-ups are non-existent, broken (a.k.a. untested), or not frequent enough. There’s really only one question you need to ask yourself when deciding how frequently you need to back-up: how much data am I willing to lose?

If you are taking fortnightly dumps off-site but three days of data loss would kill your business then your back-up plan is worse than useless.  Sitting very still with all your fingers crossed would be a more effective disaster-prevention policy.

Just installed a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse combo on my Mac Mini. In true Microsoft style you have to reboot to complete the install. What it doesn’t mention is that if you don’t remove the CD-ROM the machine will never boot again. Since, unlike most other home computers, the Mac Mini has no mechanical mechanism for ejecting a CD in emergency situations (short of dismantling the machine with a screwdriver). It looked like I was in a bit of a fix.

Fortunately, I was able to access the web on another machine and discovered this vital piece of information: if you hold down a mouse button while the Mac boots, it will eject the disc in its drive. This may be common knowledge among hard-core Mac people but it was new to me. So my soon-to-be-discarded Logitech mouse was able to come to the rescue and everybody lived happily ever after.