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Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

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Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#61

Post by atmz »

I love how Bloomberg released an article describing the press conference in the past tense half an hour before it started; Amazon hasn't caught up with Apple's secrecy yet.

Amazon is doing the right thing, which wouldn't be that surprising except that every other Android vendor has done the wrong thing. Amazon is presenting a unified, controlled environment to users (which most of them want), provides both content and app delivery services, and is selling tablets cheap enough to as not to compete directly with Apple. It will do well.

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#62

Post by achompas »

fab13n wrote: post #44
achompas wrote: post #28

Bezos, on Amazon's refreshed e-Ink readers: So meet the family. These are premium products at non-premium prices. People are going to love these products. This is Amazon's mission statement for product development. They will not compete with Apple's "revolutionary, magical" phones and tablets; instead, they'll sell quality tablets and readers to the average person at great prices. This populist attitude has been miss…

The business model to compete with Apple has been known for extremely long: offer lesser products at lesser prices. Everyone else failed at the "lesser price" part. Amazon can pull it off, because they don't need to make money with the tablet: as long as it sells ebooks and movies, it remains profitable for them. Since there's nobody to challenge them on this market, they will get the volumes to drive the BOM prices…

Since there's nobody to challenge them on this market, they will get the volumes to drive the BOM prices down, too.

Barnes & Noble is in this space too, and they have hundreds of stores that will serve as points-of-sale for the Nook. Don't forget them.

EDIT: apologies to the European HNers. Still, those B&M stores in America are incredibly popular, making it easier for Barnes & Noble to find new Nook users.

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#63

Post by j15e »

They show a lot the device in kid's hands : because 7" is too small for grown up?

I have played with a RIM Playbook once and the size factor was the same concern. Seems like under 9-10" it can't be a replacement for my laptop in any situation and it feels more like a toy.

(Disclaimer : I own an iPad)

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#64

Post by yusefnapora »

smackfu wrote: post #49

Main Amazon pages don't seem to be updated, but this URL is: http://www.kindle.com Interesting stuff: * Will still sell current Kindle as "Kindle Keyboard" for same price. * New non-touch Kindle is 2 ounces lighter than old Kindle, but has half the battery life. * The new touch Kindle is 1 ounce lighter than old Kindle, with same battery life. * Kindle Fire is 6-7 ounces lighter than an iPad 2. * All the prices that…

Thanks for that link and summary. I'm glad there's still an option to buy the non-ad supported models; I was afraid they'd phase them out. Maybe they'll even go crazy and let me use my own screensaver images without jailbreaking!

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#65

Post by cletus »

If Amazon want to not make comparisons with the iPad, something I'd strongly suggest, they should stop making statements like this:

> The Kindle Fire will have a 7-inch display and sell for $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s cheapest iPad, Amazon executives said in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Also, it's disingenuous. Of course a 7" "tablet" is cheaper than Apple's 10" tablet. Film at 11.

That being said, I'm very pleased to see this. I didn't think e-ink readers would be abandoned by Amazon but I didn't see them being a high priority either yet here we are with updated models (and me having just bought a Kindle like 2-3 months ago, grrr).

I'll have to look into it and see if the new ones are faster refresh (really the only thing I care about). If so I'll probably buy (another) one. What the hell. Although I'm not entirely convinced of the touch interface on an e-ink device. I guess we'll see.

Come to think of it, I might just buy one of the $199 tablets too. It's almost impulse territory too.

I do think Amazon could do really well with this. I imagine these will be popular holiday items. And like everyone has said, they are going to promote the hell out of these.

That all being said, I'm not giving up my iPad just yet. :)

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#66

Post by anoother »

AndreiVajnaII wrote: post #31
acabal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kindle Touch looks really similar to the Nook Touch, which is a truly excellent product. But Nook Touch still has a killer feature for a ebook nerd like me: it reads epubs. I'm assuming the KT will still be locked in to Amazon's ridiculous .mobi format, so I'm sticking with my NT for now.

The Kindle Touch's killer feature would be better PDF support. The Nook Touch looks totally unusable for PDFs.

The Nook STP runs Android, and it's pretty trivial to get Android-native PDF readers up-and-running on it. None are yet optimized for the e-ink screen, of course, but some have an option to turn off animation which helps somewhat.

Something like mupdf (which has already been ported) combined with some button/touch bindings and perhaps a touch-friendly zoom feature seems to me like it would do the job perfectly... and be an easy weekend hack for much of this site's target audience?*

I think you'd have to look long and hard for an e-ink reader with truly decent out-of-box PDF support and no serious failings in other areas — my search so far has been unfruitful, but please do tell if you've come across anything which fits the bill.

*edit: If someone actually does/has done this/something similar, please post about it here!

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#67

Post by cobrabyte »

julianb wrote: post #60

Interested to see what type of web browser they ship on these new devices.

I was checking out the specs on the Fire at Amazon's product page and got to the bottom, where they talk about Amazon Silk -- the 'split browser' used on the Fire.

It appears to offload intensive processing to Amazon EC2 instances.

Very cool stuff and, to me, more newsworthy than the launch of a tablet. I'd like to hear more details on Silk.

More info (and video from Silk developers): http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazo...

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#68

Post by ZeroGravitas »

muxxa wrote: post #30
achompas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this rationale at all. How does the Kindle Fire devalue the Kindle brand name? The Fire is a different product from the e-ink Kindles. You can still say "get a Kindle touch for $99" or "get a Kindle with hard keys for $79."

Audio is the core feature of the original iPod. Reading is the core feature of the Kindle. Reading from an lcd screen is a significantly worse experience than from e-ink. My point is that Amazon releasing the Kindle Fire is akin to if Apple released the iPod Touch (which had new features such as web browsing, youtube etc.) with degraded 8-bit audio.

The iPod Touch is no where near as good an iPod as the classic, since it lacks the physical UI (the key differentiator for the iPod, not sound quality which has been variable) but makes up for it by adding extra features. So Apple pretty much did exactly what you suggest.
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