Matt is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail... ? Learn More
The Android tablet electoral races are done. There’s a new mayor in droidville. But this guy didn’t roll into town with pomp and circumstance. He strolled down mainstreet and simply offered more than any other candidate through a plan of down-to-earth sensibility and affordability. Meet the Kindle Fire.
Amazon just unveiled the Kindle Fire, which will without question dominate the sub-iPad price points for years. Amazon did it right by copying Apple’s formula. Tablets do not sell on specs; Amazon barely touched on the Fire’s hardware during its announcement. Instead, Jeff Bezos, doing his best Steve Jobs impersonation, stood tall on the stage and ran through a long list of features that makes the Fire an iPad alternative the world has wanted.
The Fire runs Android but it’s invisible to the user. Amazon instead built a custom UI on top of an unspecified Android build. This is the right move for most consumers. Android 2.x is not meant for tablets. Sure, some die-hards love it on a slate, but most of those same users will profess that it’s not right for the general consumer. Honeycomb isn’t much better and requires more beefy hardware — a dealbreaker for a company such as Amazon looking to undercut the iPad’s price. Enter Amazon’s massive server capability.
Amazon is leveraging its many server farms to pre-render, and therefore, smooth out the overall web browsing experience. Called Amazon Silk, the browser learns users behaviors and starts caching often visited pages for quicker load times. The system intelligently offloads content to Amazon’s Elactic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that shrinks it to a more manageable size: Flash, images, and all the heavy content. All this is done before the data hits the tablet which makes for, well, a more silky experience. Visit TechCrunch a lot? Great, thanks, but the page will load even faster thanks to caching smart of Amazon Silk.
Sure, the Fire is a front-end for a bunch of Amazon services, but this back-end processing will allow the $199 tablet to feel like nothing else in its price point. It might even load pages quicker than the A5-powered iPad 2.
The Amazon Fire is, in a sense, an iPod touch and is hitting the market right when such a stop-gap product is needed. The iPad is clearly a “better” device with better hardware and more functions, but the Fire is $300 less and still rather capable. Likewise, the Fire might not be the best Android tablet, but Amazon has clearly compensated for the lackluster hardware with a fresh interface. Consumers have shown a hesitance for non-iPad tablets, but the $500 price point is out of reach for many consumers. A $200 tablet, loaded with Amazon’s media offering, is the right product to kick start tablets from niche to mainstream
Amazon followed Apple’s lead in launching media services prior to its hardware. Over the last year, company has invested heavily into streaming video, MP3 downloads and cloud computing. It all makes sense now. By showing consumers that, say, the Amazon Prime Instant Video works well on user’s computers, they’re now more comfortable buying a tablet built around the service. This media content instantly pushes the Fire to the front of the Android line. For the average consumer, the Fire is the perfect low-cost iPad alternative.
Launch Date: September 28, 1994
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them all in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells, or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazon’s...
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