Amazon’s Kindle Fire is likely to be the first successful tablet not sold by Apple, and there are several good reasons for it: the low price of $199, the convenient, portable size of 7 inches, and a rich catalog of books, movies and music offered through Amazon’s Web-based services. But Amazon’s smartest move was to avoid the fatal temptation of creating an iPad clone.
One by one, Android vendors have failed by selling tablets the same size as the iPad, for the same or higher price, but without an app store that could rival Apple’s. RIM came out with a 7-inch form factor device before Amazon, but the BlackBerry Playbook’s high price and technical limitations spelled its doom. HP tried another iPad-sized and iPad-priced tablet with the TouchPad running webOS, but it was so unsuccessful they were unloaded in a $99 fire sale. (You might argue the discounted TouchPad was the first popular non-iPad tablet.)
Amazon hasn’t raised the bar in technical specs. While it does offer a dual-core processor, the Kindle Fire has just 8GB of internal storage, relying on Amazon’s cloud instead of cramming more flash memory inside, and doesn’t even have a camera or 3G access. But Amazon has built out a giant digital media catalog, along with an Android app store to rival Google’s, smartly getting the services in place before it delivered the key piece of hardware. The Kindle Fire itself isn’t groundbreaking as far as devices go, but it should provide the most convenient platform for accessing Amazon’s many services. And by selling the Kindle Fire for $199, Amazon will reach consumers who want some of the media consumption capabilities of the iPad but weren’t willing to spend $500 or more.
“I don’t think this is really an iPad competitor,” Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg tells Ars. “This isn’t an iPad-killer. The Kindle Fire can be very successful without killing anything.”
The Kindle Fire won’t replace a laptop on a business trip, Gartenberg says. You’re not going to hook it up to a Bluetooth keyboard or a TV. But Amazon is rolling in cash from selling Kindles targeted for reading only, and adding a broader media-consumption device to the mix will build on that success. Gartenberg said the Kindle Fire could sell out during the holiday season.
Although the Kindle Fire runs Android, Amazon’s de-emphasis of the core Android platform in favor of its own custom interface and media consumption services isn’t likely to make Google happy.
“The loser here is not Apple,” Gartenberg says. “The loser, if anything, is Google and the Android ecosystem.” At today’s Amazon press conference, “Android was barely mentioned and Google wasn’t mentioned at all.”
Gartner’s tablet forecast, which shows sales to end users of 47 million iPads and 11 million Android tablets in 2011, hasn’t been updated yet to include the Kindle Fire. But Forrester researcher Sarah Rotman Epps predicts “Amazon will sell millions of tablets, and the rapid-fire adoption of the Kindle Fire will give app developers a reason—finally—to develop Android tablet apps. Apple’s place as market leader is secure, but Amazon will be a strong number two, and we expect no other serious tablet competitors until Windows 8 tablets launch.”
Amazon is competing on “price, content, and commerce,” Rotman Epps notes, drawing in video, music, games, magazines, apps and a free 30-day subscription to Amazon Prime. The Fire also features a super-fast browser called Silk, which offloads much of the processing requirements to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, reducing the number of requests sent over the network and in some cases reducing request times from 100 milliseconds to 5 milliseconds.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is US-only at launch, while Apple’s global ambitions have brought the iPad to 64 countries. Unlike the iPad, the Fire isn’t much of a productivity device, making it unlikely to be deployed in enterprises at large scale. But compared to previous tablet competitors, analysts expect the Fire to do quite well.
At the same time, Amazon has lowered the entry price for book-focused Kindles, with a $79 Kindle and a $99 Kindle Touch. Amazon leads the e-reader market with 51.7% share, ahead of Barnes & Noble’s 21.2%, according to IDC. With Amazon’s new price points, Gartenberg says “the question is how long it takes for Barnes & Noble to start dropping prices” for the Nook.
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