Kindle Fire

Merrill Lynch calls 2012 'the year of the tablet shakeout'

Bank of America's brokerage division picks winners and losers for the year ahead

The tablet market is "still in its infancy," writes Merrill Lynch's Scott Craig in a note to clients Wednesday, with "years of solid growth ahead."

But that growth is not evenly distributed, and in his report Craig and his colleagues single out seven winners and seven losers.

The winners: (I quote)

Amazon (AMZN): We expect strong sales of the Kindle Fire (4-5mn MORE

Today in Tech: Kindle Fire comes under attack

Fortune's curated selection of tech stories from the last 24 hours. Sign up to get the round-up delivered to you each and every day.

* AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is reorganizing the Internet company. Its dial-up services will be merged with Web services, which includes AOL Instant Messenger. The other three divisions will include advertising, local services, and the Huffington Post media group. (Bloomberg)

* Amazon's Kindle Fire has come under, well, fire, over some MORE

Is DigiTimes trying to kill the iPad 2's Christmas sales?

No, but the steady flow of rumors about a new iPad just around the corner aren't helping

Remember what happened to iPhone 4 sales last summer? They hit a wall in mid-July, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, when "speculation" that Apple was about to release a new iPhone, "hit extreme highs."

Now we're in the middle of what's shaping up as Apple's (AAPL) biggest holiday season ever, and the same thing MORE

Black Friday: Apple zigged while the PC market zagged

PC sales were down 8% Thanksgiving week, but demand for the MacBook Air was strong

In a note to clients Thursday, Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty rattled off several reasons to explain why retail sales of personal computers in the U.S. were down 8% year over year for the week of Nov. 20 to 26, as reported by the NPD Group.

Hard drive shortages, the lingering effects of flooding in Thailand
Price reductions in MORE

Canaccord Genuity: Kindle Fire will take 15.3% of tablet market

Estimates the iPad's share will drop from 74% to 53.2% by the time Christmas is over

The chart above is what Canaccord Genuity's T. Michael Walkley thinks the worldwide tablet market will look like this quarter after Amazon gets through disrupting it by selling a few million Kindle Fires at or below cost.

In a note to clients issued Tuesday, he estimated that ...

Apple's (AAPL) share of units sold will drop MORE

Evercore: Amazon will own 50% of Android tablet market in '12

The Kindle Fire may "vaporize" the market for every for-profit tablet maker except Apple

In a note to clients Monday about Apple (AAPL), Evercore Partners' Robert Cihra summarizes the impact of Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle Fire on the tablet market in stark terms:

While Amazon's Kindle Fire has come out of the gates strong, as expected, we see Apple maintaining its competitive lead, if anything accentuated by what now looks like the only MORE

How many Kindle Fires are being returned to Amazon?

An estimate based on the one-star reviews posted by disappointed customers

All happy Kindle Fire customers, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are the same. Unhappy customers, however, are unhappy in their own way.

To get a feel for what makes them unhappy -- and how unhappy they are -- we spent some time Saturday morning reading the Kindle Fire feedback on Amazon.com.

There were 3,678 write-ups in all, nearly half of them (47%) glowing five-star MORE

One tablet to rule them all? Baloney.

New devices from Amazon and Barnes & Noble are drawing de-facto comparisons with Apple's iPad. Turns out, the search for the uber-tablet is totally misguided.

FORTUNE -- November may well be remembered as the month the "tablet wars" got more interesting, when Amazon and Barnes & Noble catapulted competitive devices into a waiting and eager market. For the Kindle Fire in particular, media and consumers fixated on the idea that a MORE

The island of misfit tablets

What manufacturers are going to give Apple's iPad a run for the money?

For reasons known only unto itself, the NPD group saw fit Tuesday to issue a press release reporting on U.S. sales of tablets excluding the market's 400-pound gorilla: Apple's (AAPL) iPad.

"If you look at the tablet market without Apple there are a number of high-profile brands vying for that number two spot," said NPD vice president of industry analysis Stephen MORE

'Pure' PC makers reportedly fleeing the tablet market

Likely to leave the field to Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, according to DigiTimes

Taipei-based DigiTimes, which has been churning out rumors from Asian electronics parts suppliers as fast as its correspondents can type, reported Thursday that unnamed "sources from upstream supply chain" believe that PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard (HPC), Dell (DELL), Acer and Asustek will "gradually phase out" of the tablet market.

According to DigiTimes:

With Amazon offering its Kindle Fire at MORE