You knew Amazon was out looking to leave their mark on the tablet market. Many folks are excited about their latest product, the Kindle Fire. Indeed, it is a tablet device I could see getting my kids even myself. At $200, it’s a whole lot easier to justify and pay for my kids. After all, many portable game devices will cost you that much. Amazon has clearly hedged their bets on people purchasing a Kindle and buying into their products and services. The estimated cost of the Kindle Fire comes in just under $210, so Amazon will lose $10 on every Kindle Fire sold.
The recently demised HP TouchPad was fire sold at $99. Consumers responded with open wallets and credit cards in hand. Clearly, people are looking for an affordable tablet device. If Amazon’s new tablet offering can give the customer a solid, clean, app-filled, and enjoyable experience, it will see great success. At this point, we will have to wait until mid-November for the device to reach consumers hands. Then we will have some real-life tests.
A thought does arise for myself as an iPad user. Is an Kindle Fire a better choice than the iPad? Some may balk at such a thought. Others will point out missing features on the Kindle Fire like a microphone, camera, etc. Consider this. While the Kindle Fire doesn’t much up spec for spec to the iPad, it does offer something that even Apple doesn’t have- the Amazon Store. How does that make a difference? For a mere $79 a year, you can have access to Amazon’s streaming video offerings and free 2 day shipping from the Amazon Store via Amazon Prime membership. Amazon knows their Prime membership could be a huge attraction to tablet users- especially those considering jumping from an iPad to a Kindle Fire. For instance, an iPad user purchases the base iPad for $500 and subscribes to Netflix for $95.88 (for one year). That totals nearly $600, while for an Amazon Kindle Fire and Amazon Video, it’s only $279. Now sure, it’s not a fair comparison as the iPad clearly out-specs the Fire and Netflix has a larger library of streaming videos, but as Amazon releases updates to the Fire and adds more videos to their library, the deal will get much sweeter.
Apple is not worried at this point since the Kindle Fire is still not on the market, nor has any user feedback. I doubt that the Kindle Fire will make a huge dent in Apple’s iPad pie right away, but like a little dog with a big bite, Kindle Fire is going to nip at the iPad’s heals all the way. A day is coming where Apple won’t be able to ignore the Fire at their feet.
Amazon tablet costs $209.63 to make, IHS estimates | Reuters.
