In April 2010 Apple released the iPad to the public, launching the subsequent race to capture this audience with faster, more functional, and shinier tablets. All have failed, with the iPad representing 75% of tablet sales in 2010, with an expected increase to 83% by the end of 2011. On November 15th this year, a challenger will arise, aiming to topple Apple’s reign on the tablet market.
It is the Kindle Fire—the feisty contender coming out on November 15th from Amazon we’re dying to tell you about. But first, some exposition:
We have been drooling over this kind of technology ever since the members of Starfleet started strutting around with their fancy PADDs (Personal Access Display Device, for the Trekkie-challenged). We feebly attempted to reproduce the PADDs with PDAs, beginning with the notable Apple Newton. But, encountering failure, we could only settle with fantasies of glossy handheld screens in the decades to come.
Widespread interest in tablet technology resurfaced with the advent of the iPad era, resulting in a sharp increase in demand for tablets, with just as many companies rushing to benefit from the frenzy. As a result, the tablet has again become a technology buzzword. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2010, tablets dominated the floor, demonstrating the tech industry’s desperation to jump on the tablet bandwagon. The lack of significant differentiation between tablets, in both technology and price, has played an important role in keeping Apple ahead.
Despite this tablet craze, a large portion of the tech audience has remained a distant and skeptical observer of the portable technology. Why has Apple failed to capture the hearts of these wary people?
In part, it is limited functionality–particularly of the apps available for the iPad. It is also what some perceive as an overly-friendly and severely restrictive iOS. Outweighing all other factors, however, is the price tag. While many major competitors have arguably better functionality by adopting the Android OS and associated app market—the less-regulated darling of indie developers— they have not offered notably lower prices, nor a significantly different set of features.
Contenders to Apple have been attempting to improve tablet features to steal the iPad audience, rather than expanding to the entirely ignored audience that has not yet entered the tablet market. As a result, these competitor tablets include features trivial to users interested in iPad alternatives: everything and anything other than price. This has been a mistake: Apple’s reputation and streamlined look have made all direct competition nonstarters.
Herein lies the Kindle Fire’s greatest strength in the market. Amazon’s product is not competing directly with the iPad. The current model to be released possesses a seven-inch screen– as opposed to the standard ten-inch screen of the iPad– less onboard memory, and no camera, which enables the significantly cheaper price. By eschewing the bells and whistles in favor of a significantly reduced price while keeping the features most important to the majority of the tablet audience— a high-quality Internet browsing and media experience—the Kindle Fire is appealing and accessible to the demographics Apple has been neglecting.
There are plans for a ten-inch Kindle Fire in the future for a yet-to-be-projected price, but it’s likely Amazon will get its foot in the door with its current seven-inch model.
The low-price isn’t entirely a result of the smaller screen and reduced features. The Kindle Fire is being sold for $199, but the manufacturing costs are estimated to be $209. Amazon is losing about ten dollars with every sale. Besides the price, this is fantastic for future Kindle Fire owners.
Why is this fantastic? Besides the obvious—a ridiculously good deal on an expensive piece of technology— Amazon will generate a huge base of Kindle Fire users. This in turn will inspire a boon in Android development for tablets; Android tablets have only had marginal success and subsequently have attracted fewer developers than the iPad iOS. With a larger pool of Android tablet app customers, more developers will be attracted to Android tablet development. Users will see more developers creating a greater variety of high-quality apps, including new and interesting utilization of tablet technology in gaming.
Selling the hardware at a discounted price is similar to the model Apple has implemented with the iPhone. AT&T subsidizes a substantial portion of the costs of the phone, in the anticipation that the customer will pay them back through years of phone service. I was unfortunate enough to experience this first-hand when my iPhone was stolen. I was forced to pay the actual price for the iPhone: a few hundred dollars more than the $200 I paid when AT&T chipped in. Only then did the absurdity of the price for my fairly useful phone hit me, and boy did it hit my wallet hard.
The model is known as “freebie marketing,” has proven successful everywhere from iPhones to razor blades, and is likely to launch a successful career for the Kindle Fire.
This model highlights a possible downside, however. Kindle Fire users may have to anticipate paying for more applications. Currently, Amazon advertises that users will gain access to millions of free movies, songs, and books… as an Amazon Prime member. Buying the Kindle Fire will give the user a free month of Amazon Prime (a disappointingly short trial period), but the user must continue paying $79 per year to keep up the membership. Consequently, a Kindle Fire purchase is much more worthwhile if one already regularly keeps an (admittedly inexpensive) Amazon Prime account. Unfortunately this membership doesn’t preclude the necessity to pay for many of the desired apps and games that make this tablet appealing.
Another possible downfall is developers will need to take special consideration when developing for the less standard seven-inch screen—whether this will be a real obstacle is yet to be determined. There is also some contention over whether the feature-reduction is too significant, limiting the usefulness of the Kindle Fire to the point of making it unremarkable, with a woefully small 8GB of memory (to be compensated for with Amazon’s free cloud storage service) and a currently limited selection of apps.
However, if an Amazon Prime subscription and shelling out a few dollars on the occasional game are not a problem, the Kindle Fire is a ridiculously good deal. Besides the free media, there is a slew of innovative and well designed features that make this hardware a serious contender in the tablet market. I join those predicting the Kindle Fire will revolutionize the tablet industry. It is opening an awe-inspiring piece of technology to a huge audience that has been neglected by Apple and many of its direct competitors, which we can hope will alert more developers to the untapped market share, inspire lower prices, more Android Tablet development, and ever-more innovation.
The Kindle Fire is being released November 15th and is available for pre-order at $199 on (predictably) Amazon. If you are interested in learning more about the technical features of the Kindle Fire, check it out on Amazon.