Amazon Kindle Touch (book reader) and Fire (tablet)

Been following today’s launch of their new products.
The most impressive thing is the price, which I guess you can take both ways 🙂

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2

Fire in a nutshell:

$199.00
7″ Wi-Fi Tablet
Multitouch screen
7.5 hours battery (video playing)
8GB
414g

Apps promised including streaming video from Amazon’s Prime service (£50 a year in the UK but I can’t see the video feature on there)

Fast cloud-based web processing.

(and for all those who care – Flash support!)

Nov US launch – no word on UK availability (they just announced a new lower price normal Kindle)

More on their cloud-based web browsing tech
http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/

also 2 kindle touches and an $80 kindle. Not sure if the $80 one is ad supported or not. Still, its smaller and lighter than my ‘old’ one 🙁

The most interesting thing about the new Kindle Touch’s I thought was the worldwide 3G one with no contract or charges for $149

Fair bit of discussion about it already on the iPad thread (oddly)

The new Kindle available in the UK (not the Touch) is a slimed down version of the old one, no touch screen but looks pretty nice.

$79 in the US
£89 in the UK

Is this legal?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0051QVF7A?country=GB

I’m not sure if the touch screen really adds much to the Kindle apart from fingerprints all over what your reading. Yes it means it can be smaller but it’s plenty small enough as it is.

I don’t know if they’ve changed the screen but my Kindle 3 doesn’t attract fingerprints

Is this legal?

is what legal

This is good news.

Apple will respond with a cheaper iPad.

Apple will respond with a cheaper iPad.

wont happen

I could imagine a kind of ipad nano maybe? That is what they did with the iPod to target the cheaper end of the market.

ipad nano? That’s an iphone, surely.

/dcms

ipad nano

the touch then?

The 3g touch is the same data plan as the old 3g. Does the tablet have 3g or just wifi (guessing the latter). If they pull off a 3g one without roming charges then I’m in

Am I reading that right, the current Kindle is now rebadged as the “Kindle Keyboard”?

The current 3G one doesn’t have any roaming charges, so I’d assume it’s the same for the tablet as they want to to use their “Cloud” services.

Edit: Hmm – no mention of 3G anywhere.

The Fire is basically a 7″ tablet with a proprietary OS, yes? Playbook, then.

The cloud stuff they’re launching is pretty funky, mind; that’s obviously their USP.

$79 in the US
£89 in the UK

Is this legal?

That the $79 version is advert-subsidised. It’s $109 for an advert-free one. So, not quite the bumming it initially looks like.

Stop the motherloving presses, the Fire is Android based.

Forked Android

Stop the motherloving presses, the Fire is Android based.

Well yes, that’s been known for ages 🙂

Not by me!

But no SD card slot – 8GB wont get me very far – hack the usb port?

8GB must be nearly 1,000 books?

I was thinking other media too.

It says that all the apps for Kindle Fire will be Amazon-approved. So it’s not the full Android marketplace.
It may mean that most of the good ones will make it across though.

A couple of reports that the Fire 2 will be out early 2012 and will be the device they actually want to launch. This is allegedly a cheaper playbook.

The Kindle touch 3G has me more excited!

Apparently you can use it one handed, so I guess there’ll be porn available 😈

This is good news.
Apple will respond with a cheaper iPad.

Bwaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Please stop, I’ll have to wear a corset, for fear my sides would split.
This is aimed at the Nook, it can’t compare with an iPad for flexibility.

I can’t see a significant advantage in having 3G for the Kindle Touch
I made the decision to go for the wireless only version a few months ago and I’m yet to think “I wish I could download a book now”
I have so many unread books on mine, that I can’t ever envisage being away from wifi or my PC so long that running out of reading material is a possibility – I’d have to be in a John McCarthy situation for that to happen
Sure, it has a clunky browser in monochrome that you may use in an emergency but nothing else really

3G certainly benefits Amazon though with loads of spontaneous purchases.
Call me a cynic if you will but 3G is there purely to fill Amazon’s bank balance

the 3g would be better for me as I often go away travelling, having access to emails\google (albeit with a clunky interface) would help in booking/researching the next place to stay

Also if you use a kindle to get a morning paper to read on your commute to work, I can imagine the 3g would be very useful

uplink – Member
I can’t see a significant advantage in having 3G for the Kindle Touch
I made the decision to go for the wireless only version a few months ago and I’m yet to think “I wish I could download a book now”
I have so many unread books on mine, that I can’t ever envisage being away from wifi or my PC so long that running out of reading material is a possibility – I’d have to be in a John McCarthy situation for that to happen
Sure, it has a clunky browser in monochrome that you may use in an emergency but nothing else really

3G certainly benefits Amazon though with loads of spontaneous purchases.
Call me a cynic if you will but 3G is there purely to fill Amazon’s bank balance

+1.
My other half bought a Kindle recently and went for the 3G option. When I asked her why she went for that over the wireless version she didn’t really know. So far she has just downloaded stuff while at home over wireless…….

I still think they shoudl have called it the Kindle Surprise.

Bwaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Please stop, I’ll have to wear a corset, for fear my sides would split.
This is aimed at the Nook, it can’t compare with an iPad for flexibility.

And some wonder why the fanbois come across badly 😉

The thing is, as discussed, Apple pretty much created the tablet market so the iPad is what people had to get to get something that worked well. Currently the Android alternatives that work well aren’t really any cheaper.

If a much cheaper alternative comes out (eg the Fire) and it works for people then it will be a direct competitor even if the iPad is inherently a ‘better’ product. In consumers’ minds the fact that they aren’t the same isn’t always relevant. If a consumer wants “a tablet” and the Fire ticks the boxes for them (which cost is always going to be a big one for many), they’ll get that rather than the more expensive option.

what clubber says.

How many people with an iPad do more than just browse the web, look at films and spend 5 minutes playign with a free app before discarding it?

There was quite a good comment by a reader in the Grauniad:

Some of the media are making this out to be a battle between Apple and Amazon, when in reality it is nothing of the sort. They are using diametrically opposed business models and releasing tablets that could hardly be more different.

Apple sell iPad hardware at a healthy profit and sell content to support the hardware sales, but Apple don’t make much profit from the content. Amazon is selling the Fire at either a very low margin, or possibly at a small loss, but relying on selling content to make the profits. In effect, they’re giving away the razor in order to sell the blades, or a more recent example would be giving away the printer in order to sell ink cartridges.

The products themselves are totally different. The Fire has half the screen area of an iPad and is stripped down to just the absolute essentials. But the big attraction is that it is half the price of an iPad.

iPads represent the quality end of the tablet spectrum, while Fires look like they could dominate the low end of the tablet spectrum. I don’t think that Apple will be concerned about the Fire as those who will only spend $200 on a tablet were never going to buy iPads. The people who must be losing sleep tonight are those manufacturers who are hoping to sell other tablets. There are now just two price points for tablets , <$200 cheap and cheerful, or >$500 for a quality one. Google might not be that happy either as the Android operating system is being used in a way that greatly diminishes Google’s opportunities to extract money from it.

Rivals will now have to make tablets cheaper than $200 and still make a profit, or else match the sophistication of the iPad together with a comprehensive ecosystem and still match the $500 price tag. Either task is quite a formidable challenge.

Can the Fire match the iPad ? Of course not, but it was never intended to. It’s a different concept aimed at a different type of customer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/12606108

To some extent I agree with that article BUT…

If the market didn’t release something at the Fire kind of price then I do think that many who will now buy the Fire would have bought a £400+ tablet and based on marketshare, that would likely be an iPad.

I guess it will mean that there may be more Android tabs being made to a lower price to compete but that makes Apple’s position less strong too IMO since at present the good android tabs are prices at similar prices to the iPads.

At the moment, a tablet is something new, cool, exciting(ish!) and many are willing to pay a premium for it. As time goes on and tablets are less exclusive/exciting, I reckon that people will pay less – same as, say, laptops were/are. That’s where the threat really lies IMO.

at the end of the day this will do about 80% of what the iPad does at under half price

what’s not to like?

If they can get it out for £150 over here (although I suspect they’ll go $ for £ and have it at £199) I’d buy one in a heartbeat.

Still happy with my Kindle2 though for reading books. E-ink is so much nice to look at for long periods than a tablet screen imho.

They’ll compete with the iPad by not trying to be an iPad (as someone much more cleverer than I has said somewhere)

what’s not to like?

This

But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.