Jack's Opinion

I have worked on computers since 1982 almost every day. I had my first internet connection in the early ’90s. Since 1994 I am more or less in online marketing. I tweet, I bing, I facebook, I wrote books. But I never ever wrote my own blog. I never thought I needed to, but too many people are telling me I should share my thoughts with others. By the way, you might think my English is weird. You are right; I am originally from Germany. Please excuse any uncommon grammar or unorthodox spelling.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Amazon Kindle Fire - an iPad Killer?

Finally the new kindle fire is announced and ready for preorder. The 7 inch full color touch screen costs only $199 and is available November 15th.

This is $300 less than the cheapest iPad. The kindle has almost similar battery power, dual core fast processor, 8GB memory and supports flash.

I am not sure if it will be yet an iPad contender. The Kindle screen is much smaller and the Kindle has no camera like the first iPad. The design looks cheaper than the iPad and the kindle is more an entertainment toy than the iPad. However the kindle will eventual replace the original kindle (which has ink paper) and many other low end tablets. The big plus of the Kindle is the Amazon cloud. The user can store "unlimited" data in the amazon cloud, even if the kindle has only 8GB memory. Therefore there is not much memory needed, but it is still enough memory for an 8 hour flight to watch downloaded movies. Amazon cloud can compete very well with Apple and is even much cheaper. Amazon has over 10.000 movies and 17 million songs to choose from. The Kindle Store offers over 1 million books, including 800,000 titles at $9.99 or less. In addition, over 2 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available.

No other company than Apple, Amazon and Google can yet offer such big amount of music, books etc.

The complete package around the kindle is compelling. They even want to give the user the fastest browsing experience with cloud cached websites, which Amazon calls Silk. Amazon Silk is a revolutionary, cloud-accelerated browser that uses a "split browser" architecture to leverage the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud.

The whole product page at amazon is a comparison the the iPad. The iPad is even named when Amazon tries to explain the display. Another hint to Apple is the note that you don't need a computer, everything syncs over the air.

Please go to the product page, it actually makes fun to read. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2/ref=famstripe_kf

I of course did preorder the Kindle, but I need to wait 8 weeks before I know how good it is.

I think the Kindle Fire will take 3 to 5 million from the iPad market and will be for a while the second strongest tablet, because of the price and service Amazon offers. But it will not replace the iPad in higher income customer class. For sure it will take a lot of market share from the existing Apple competitions.

The Kindle runs on an Android version modified by Amazon. It is not clear if other apps than the ones offered from Amazon can be installed on the Kindle Fire.

So far what I saw, I have to say I like it. Not that this is best tablet ever, but the price is very very nice.

But the kindle is two step further away from a computer than the iPad. The kindle is the real in between device between phone and iPad (:))

Buying the Kindle is not a mistake and no waste of money, something we can have in addition to our iPad.

It is interesting that Amazon sells their hardware to sell their Service, and Apple sells their service to sell their hardware.

So similar they both are and so different they are.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States