Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of the futures? With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter of time.
To a point; for the vast majority of users, the increase in hardware requirements for modern desktop tasks plateaued quite some time ago. The exception to this is video games; they've continued to drive hardware advancement on the desktop.
Mobile devices are nearly on par with where that plateau began, and there are plenty of reasons to increase the CPU/GPU performance for the purpose of games. In this context, it certainly appears to me that Amazon is wasting their resources on what amounts to a massively complex privacy snafu.
The devices are fast enough, but with that speed came massive battery life problems. Therefore, the same problem exists, its effects have just moved somewhere else. It is therefore not comparable with the desktop.
... but Silk is being rolled out on a WiFi-only tablet. Most users won't ever have to worry about a crappy cell data connection.
Some day, sure, they'll ship with 3G connections. But client hardware on future devices will only be faster and more capable.
A SPDY-link to Amazon's private caching/compression network is a great win and differentiator. But why even open the can of worms that is two-tier _processing_?
If they're leaving flash enabled on Silk, surely that dual-core chip is capable of keeping up with the bulk of browser rendering and js tasks.
Your problems may not be their problems. Their "problem" is learning as much about their customers as possible. This solution precisely scratches that itch.
IIRC US bandwidth is increasing roughly 10% per year. I'm pretty sure it's some private company that does these metrics though, as I think this is the only thing the government releases:
I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I just remember it being really difficult to actually find the statistic. But the takeaway is that although we are theoretically #27 in terms of broadband speed, our actual broadband speeds aren't that much lower than in other countries.
The Akamai report here is probably the most credible source. I remember there being one other report that covered this info, but I can't find it right now.
Yeah, my transformer is Tegra2 based and pretty quick with the rendering. Tegra3 is right around the corner. Whats the use of this,really? Save 4 dollars per unit on a cheaper cpu and a little battery, but paying for it by pounding EC2 servers? Heck, we're in the age of 4G and wifi. Slow 3G might be par for the course in the iPhone world, but not elsewhere.
Danger, Opera, and Blackberry have all done this with lackluster results. Mobile Chrome has the chops to handle the modern web. This kind of pre-rendered solution might have been a good idea 4 or 5 years ago, but now its questionable and brings up issues of privacy, vendor lock in, EC2 issues (hi, my website was down for 48 hours a couple of months ago), EC2 load issues, etc.
Bandwidth and CPU don't solve latency which today contributes most of your perceived page load wait, and thanks to current web practices, has been getting steadily worse. SPDY and Silk address latency.
Is that bandwidth figure representative of most Americans or worldwide? We have 25 people at our company in NYC, for example, and only one of them has a connection faster than your typical Time Warner cable line.
The fastest mobile phones (and even tablets) are still significantly less powerful than a netbook. Amazon's own devices will probably have even weaker CPUs than cutting edge mobile devices simply because the price point.
