The Kindle Fire was recently unveiled by Amazon recently. It’s the latest entrant into a crowded tablet market dominated by the Apple iPad and newer iPad 2. So why woudl Amazon spend so much time and effort on a new tablet in a crowded field dominated by a Apple? Talk about David and Goliath. Well for one, Amazon has a content library that Apple dreams about. Yes all you tent to hear about it iTunes. Well i say iTunes, Schmi tumes. It’s a decent music library but like all things Apple, it’s a totalitarian design. All proprietary, all the time.
Amazon has access to almost all of the same music that Apple does, but also leverages their world’s biggest content network of movies, books, TV shoes and other digital content. And Amazon is a trusted retailer. Go to Amazon to buy some shoes, and get some content for your Kindle Fire while you are there. The affinity marketing angle works wonders when you are already the world’s largest online retailer. Just ask any of the millions of Amazon affiliates who shovel traffic to Amazon and collect revenue if they buy something. So many people regularly shop at Amazon that it works, and works very well. The Kindle Fire builds and helps with the cross marketing ploy. In short, Amazon couldn’t let Apple become the sole destination for things like online content.
Now you might also wonder how Amazon is going to take on the formidable Apple when it comes to apps. Well here Amazon did the smart thing, which was leverage off the very established and exponentially growing Androd market. Android is poised to overtake Apple in size as more and more phone manufacturers build awesome Android phones that sell for much less than the iPhones. So it’s a gamble, but one that looks like it will pay off easily as Android is simply not going away. So let google/Android do the heavy lifting and just piggyback.
Now when it come to technology you might think Amazon doesn’t have a prayer going up against the likes of Apple. But Amazon invented the ereader before tablets were even a dream. So in theory they are the experts in handheld devices. They did several smart things design wise that I think were the right choice. As anyone who has ever held an iPad will attest to, it’s clumsy. You really can’t hold it in one hand, and are always at risk of dropping the thing. Amazon decide to build the Kindle Fire as large as could be held in one hand. Smart choice. The screen is big enough for any viewing needs, but you can hold it in one hand. Duh!
When it comes to features and price Amazon matches the iPad 2 in every way. Now I will grant you that Amazon did not put on a few features like a camera that they considered frivolous when you already have them on a phone. And in the most important aspects, storage and browsing speed Amazon simply kills it. The leveraged the “Amazon cloud”, a somewhat ominous term for Amazon’s giant banks of dedicated web servers that seem to be about as limitless as Google’s. This cloud is used to offer Kindle Fire users unlimited storage in addition to the 8 Gb of onboard storage. So suddenly iPad 2′s 16 Gb of onboard storage seems impotent. Cloud storage is backed up and you will never lose it. And the Kindle Fire uses that cloud in a way that every geek will love. They use it to do alot of the heavy lifting in web requests. The cloud servers gather up the relevant data and compress it and get it to the new Silk browser (as in smooth as Silk) much smoother and faster than ever possible. Expect to see this technology copied and used by others. Talk about leverage. You don’t just have a tablet, you have the Amazon cloud to help. Wow! Impressive.
In short, if you are a rabid apple fan boy or girl and you carry around your Apple products like you would a coach purse, you will not be a Kindle Fire buyer. But if you are even remotely value conccious and demand top tier technology from your purchases, the Kindle Fire will be your tablet choice bar none.