Is Kindle Fire the first true competitor to Apple’s all conquering iPad?
It was the most hotly anticipated tech announcement of the year and Amazon’s debut Android Tablet, the Kindle Fire, looks like it might be set to deliver everything we could have hoped for.
It’s a $199 device (which, sadly, won’t yet be available outside of thr US) that packs in a seven inch display with Gorilla Glass for toughness an IPS technology for wider viewing angles, and a dual-core processor. Yet the specs seem largely irrelevant, because Amazon can offer what Apple can, but what no other tablet manufacturer can: content. While other tablets have competed with – and surpassed – the iPad on specs, the Kindle Fire will compete on its position as media consumption device. The process of buying music, movies and eBooks on Kindle Fire will be as seamless as on an iPad. Only Amazon will enable its users to do so at half the price Apple does.
Kindle Fire – Amazon Android Tablet. Amazon seems rather reluctant about even acknowledging the presence of Android
Kindle Fire – Amazon Android Tablet | The True iPad Competitor
How far this benefits Android on the whole, however, is still open to question. Indeed, Amazon seems rather reluctant about even acknowledging the presence of Android on the device.
Gingerbread is there, but this is an Amazon Android Tablet. It has Amazon’s own very heavily customised user interface. Amazon’s App Store (not the Android Market), run Amazon’s web browser, and is based around Amazon’s services. The potential audience that the company will be targeting with this Tablet may not be aware this is an Android product at all.
So what will be the impact of the Kindle Fire on the rest of the Android tablet market? The obvious first thought is that they will have to drop considerably in price. Yet this may not be easy. Amazon could potentially afford to make a loss on every Fire it sells, knowing that it will more than make up for it with the content each user buys. This is the same model Microsoft used with XBox 360 and it enabled it to dominate the games market. The likes of HTC and Samsung don’t have this luxury, though. Not only are their content stores far kess mature, but they don’t have millions of customers already shopping with them either.
The fact that the Amazon Android Tablet appears to have been a rush release designed to capture the US Christmas market does at least give them a few months to rethink their response, although it will make $500 tablets a tough sell in the meantime.
The final potential implication is one we don’t yet know, and it relates to Amazon’s long-term ambitions. Android is an open-source OS, and it is hardly unthinkable that Amazon could usurp it. Rather than simply skinning what is available, they could begin work on their own version of the OS, entirely independent of Google and its partners. Now tat would put the cat among the pigeons.
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