Here come Amazon!
It feels like an Amazon tablet has been rumored for as long as the iPad (then just called Apple Tablet) was. But today, finally, Amazon have stepped up to the place and brought with them a true challenger. Is the Kindle Fire an iPad killer? I don’t think so. Is the Kindle Fire the first sign off a true competitor to the iPad? Absolutely.
The iPad owns the tablet market. out of the 7.2 million sold in the US last quarter, 6 million of them were iPads. I don’t think the Fire will eat in to that too much. What i think it will do is quickly match it. Consumers are looking for cheap, capable tablets that come as well delivered as the iPad. This is where every single competitor has fallen down, as they did with the iPhone but are now turning it around. You don’t go to consumers with comparable specs. You go to them with comparable eco systems.
The iPad is the door to music, movies, tv, apps, books and the web. The BlackBerry playbook, the Galaxy Tab family, the Azus Transformer, the Motorola Xoom and the now dead HP TouchPad are all tablets – not solutions. The Amazon Kindle Fire is a solution. Amazon has movies, tv, music, books and apps. Along with the this they have brought cloud storage and syncing to match and best iCloud and also their own browser, delivering the web.
The Kindle Fire is the first android tablet that i’ve ever wanted to get my hands on. Not because of its design, thats a BB PlayBook. Not for it’s bountiful amount of cameras or its one killer feature. It’s because I want to see just what Amazon can offer me, as a consumer, an alternate eco system for my entertainment.
There have been a lot of false starts in the Tablet War and i still dont think it’s really begun. What has started today is the Tablet Eco System War (TESW). Luckily, this wont be a bloody war. It’s the battle for you money and with competition, consumers will be the winners.
Let’s see what Microsoft and partners bring with Windows 8 to the TESW!