Apple iPad/Amazon Fire

The Amazon Fire was released to much fanfare this week.  The Fire is Amazon’s first foray into the tablet market, a market that has been absolutely dominated by Apple and the iPad.  The Fire (details can be found here) boasts some pretty nifty features including what I think will be most important to its success- tight integration into the Amazon Infrastructure (Music/Movies/Apps/Cloud/etc).

Having had a couple of days to reflect on it, I think the Fire is exactly what this market needs right now. Tablets, for a great majority of people, are content consumption devices.  Already, Amazon has perfected the content consumption device with the Kindle. I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t love their Kindle for what they can do with it.  Now, Amazon is adding additional content to what is already a phenomenal gadget. And they are doing so at a price of less than half of what the iPad is selling for. This is an absolute win for Amazon and watch, this thing is going to sell like the dickens this Christmas.

That said, it’s not an “iPad killer.” It IS going to get a huge chunk of the lower-end tablet market that “knows they want a tablet but aren’t sure what.” Before now, these people likely would have bought a 16 gb wifi only iPad for $500. Now, they will buy the Fire for $200 and they will probably love it. They can get books/movies/music and some web browsing plus Facebook and for about 90% of people, that is what they use the internet for.  BUT, as mentioned, there’s just too much it doesn’t do to be a complete iPad killer. Content creation, video editing, camera/video camera/video chat, bluetooth. There is too big a market out there for the iPad (surprisingly, considering how skeptical I was when it first came out) and the iPad apps and the frenzy Apply has built around this thing. The Fire will absolutely take a bite out of Apple’s market share, but the iPad will still be king.