Amazon heats up tablet market with Kindle Fire

MANILA, Philippines - Amazon unveiled in New York last week its $199 kindle Fire tablet that could have a better shot at challenging Apple iPad’s dominance better than any other tablets around.

The two most important things going for it are its price and Amazon’s own content and services. Most iPad contenders today try to gain market share by simply offering a piece of hardware that relies largely on the Google Android Market for content.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, said the Kindle Fire is not (just) a tablet but a service.

In an open letter to Amazon customers worldwide posted at Amazon.com’s homepage, Bezos wrote that Kindle Fire brought everything that they have been working on at Amazon for 15 years together into a single, fully integrated experience for customers.

With Kindle Fire, Bezos said users will have instant access to Amazon’s huge selection of digital content, delivered in a full color seven-inch touch screen with extra-wide viewing angle.

One can now pre-order a Kindle Fire, which will be officially released on Nov. 15, from Amazon.com and from retailers that already carry the Kindle e-readers. The Wi-Fi-ready Kindle Fire weighs only 14.6 ounces, runs on a dual-core processor, and provides eight gigabytes of internal storage plus free external storage in the Amazon Cloud Drive.

Furthermore, Kindle Fire has a radical new mobile Web browser called Amazon Silk that Bezos said taps Amazon’s EC2 cloud service to accelerate Web browsing, with the added bonus of supporting Web pages that use Flash.

The Kindle Fire also comes with a one-month free trial of Amazon Prime, a $79 annual membership service that includes streaming videos and free two-day shipping. Amazon Prime Library has tens of thousands of commercial-free movies and TV shows.

However, buying a Kindle Fire for $199 won’t get you an embedded camera, microphone and 3G connectivity. In short, no video chat.

In fact, some early testers said they didn’t expect the Kindle Fire to deliver a full-fledged tablet experience as the Seattle-based Amazon clearly planned it to do things somewhat differently.

For one, the Kindle Fire reportedly runs on a highly reworked version of the older Android 2.3 that resulted in a completely new interface. That one-click icon to Android Market we all got accustomed to seeing on our Android devices? Kindle Fire’s not going to have it. Why? Because Amazon runs its own Android app store.

Though still an Android machine, Kindle Fire has not been suited with the standard Google applications either and the Amazon App Store apparently doesn’t offer many popular third-party app services like Skype and those tied to Google such as Google Docs, Google Maps, Google+ and YouTube.

Instead, Kindle Fire is fitted with Amazon’s own e-mail client and other things that make it more an Amazon media slate than an honest-to-goodness Android tablet that supports customizable home screens and other fun stuff.

But designing Kindle Fire differently than other Android tablets may actually be a good thing. According to Gene Munster, analyst at Piper Jaffray, a middle-market investment bank and asset management firm serving clients in the US and internationally, a Kindle Fire with features that are much similar as the others won’t challenge the Apple iPad’s leadership.

Munster sees the Kindle Fire gaining market traction in the 30 to 40 percent market that iPad contenders currently share.

“In the 30-40 percent of the market, this device can be a player with its price as its biggest feature,” said Munster. He believes the Kindle Fire can have a definite market but it won’t affect the 60 percent projected share of the Apple iPad next year.

“Apple iPad currently has 90 percent of the market but we see it going down to 60 percent by 2012 but it will still continue to grow bigger as the market will also grow so much,” Munster said.