Although the iPhone 4S might be dismissed as nothing but a spec bump phone, it does have one distinctive advantage over every other smartphone out there: Siri. Anyone who wants to compete with the iPhone 4S (and, presumably, the future iPad 3) will have to come up with their own answer to Siri, or be lost.

Well, what do you know. The hunt by Apple’s competition to find small voice recognition startups and absorb them has already begun with the revelation that Amazon has already picked up a company in the hopes of launching their own would-be Siri-like speech recognition service.

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After briefly being seen as an ally of Apple’s goal towards crushing Android, Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet is back to threatening iPad sales. A Wall Street analyst now says 26 percent of people considering buying the Fire are putting on hold purchasing the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant’s tablet. What’s more, consumers are more likely to buy the Amazon tablet than the iPad.

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After making headlines in 2010 by yanking its recommendation of the iPhone 4, the advocacy group Consumer Reports is now picking Android smartphones as a better buy than the iconic Apple handset. A review pointing to larger screens and faster 4G networks seems to run counter to record-breaking sales of the iPhone 4S.

The Kindle Fire may be shaping up to be the first real device to challenge the iPad’s share of the tablet market but it’s not going to go unchallenged: book retailing giant Barnes & Noble have just announced the next generation of their own Android-based reading tablet, and unlike the Kindle Fire, its specs match and even exceed the iPad 2’s for half the price.

Remember HP’s fiasco with the Slate, then the TouchPad? You’d think the company would run from the tablet market like a Silicon Valley investor with his hair on fire — but you’d be wrong.