The new Kindle – Kindle Fire!
You may already know that on the 28th September, Amazon announced a new Kindle, the Kindle Fire. Less well known is the announcement of two other Kindle models. In fact, the Kindle Fire is not an e-reader, it’s a slate or pad, and so represents a new branch in the Kindle lineage.
It follows that the significant part of the announcement is the Kindle Fire. Amazon appears to be going after the ‘Slate Tablet’ market started by Apple with the iPad™, and closely followed by the likes of Acer and Samsung with their own similar ‘me-too’ offerings.
Of course, the Slate market is still evolving, as users find out what slates are good-for, and where they are less useful. The key factor here is that with the Kindle Fire, Amazon are anticipating an evolvement of the Slate concept, and at the same time bringing users even closer into the Amazon supply chain. The concept of making it easy to purchase content from the original device supplier was pioneered by the Apple iStore, and utilised by Amazon for Kindle ebooks, but here Amazon have gone one step further by tying the devices’ everyday operation into their own Internet based cloud computing infrastructure. Effectively they are now taking a page out Google’s strategy by giving them an opportunity to maintain a close customer involvement on a minute-by-minute basis. This combined with Amazon subscription streaming content delivery means Amazon are firmly placing the Kindle Fire as their portal to consume a wide range of media they provide.
On a more technical aspect, the Kindle Fire is different to many other slates, the trend has been to boost memory capacity and CPU speed, however with the Fire, Amazon have leveraged their own ‘cloud’ infrastructure to offload some of the storage and processing requirements usually associated with slates. It would be wrong to say the Fire is limited, it’s using reasonable CPU, graphics and memory capacity for today (maybe a bit stingy on secondary storage), but with a good, fast Internet connection it should make up for it using Amazon’s cloud storage. This factor combined with the close post-sale customer tie-in for additional content sales, probably means that Amazon has been able to crunch the price. At 6” the screen size is still small compared with many other slates, and it’s pitched a media delivery and apps, so it will be interesting to see where it fits into the user gamut between those using smartphones and full size slates.
The other two models (released in late November) are conventional e-readers with ‘e-ink ‘ displays, long battery life, smaller and lighter, and now with the benefit of the same size 6” multi-touch screens. Historically e-ink LCD displays couldn’t support capacitive touch screen overlays, but they are now appearing from several suppliers as technology improves. Pricing is held low, but at the moment there is no announcement of a large screen version. Reportedly, volume sales of e-book readers are definitely at the low price point end of the market, that is, small size units, highly portable and the lower cost the better. If implemented well, a touch screen interface should make the reading and searching experience much more enjoyable and intuitive to use.
