Forget that the $50 annual LTE data plan only gets you 250MB a month (enough to carry me for a week on a tablet, and worthless for streaming). \u00a0Forget that they’ll all have ads on the screen. Forget that the 9-inch model won’t ship until Thanksgiving. \u00a0What Amazon announced yesterday demonstrated that they get what tablet computing can do for them and their business.<\/p>\n
Amazon forked Android to run their devices. \u00a0This was a good move before, when Honeycomb was a big bag of suck. It might not be as necessary now, but Amazon wants a UI optimized for purchasing and consuming media – more than anyone else, they’ve embraced the accusation leveled against tablets in general and the iPad in particular. The Kindle Fire is just fine being a tool for consumption. It wants you to consume, and it wants to sell you things to consume.<\/p>\n
Which explains the price point, no doubt made lower by the ads: Amazon can’t be making much money on these things. \u00a0The retail cost is mostly commensurate with similar devices, but the specs suggest that the profit margin has been pared down to a nail-clipping. \u00a0When Google does this with the Nexus 7, there’s a reason: get a good clean Android tablet experience in front of people as easily as possible. But when Amazon does it, it’s with the confidence that they’ll make it up on sales later.<\/p>\n
And they will. \u00a0Books, TV shows, movies – all available through the browser, and Amazon Prime streaming is tooling up to take on Netflix (and stands a pretty good chance of doing it). \u00a0There is an Amazon App Store, which provides an Apple-esque curated experience and the assurance that you can browse through and all<\/em> the listed apps will definitely work on your Kindle Fire. \u00a0And because the consumption experience is so tightly integrated, there’s the power to do things like X-Ray, in which you watch the movie, say “hey I know that guy”, tap on his face AND GET HIS IMDB INFORMATION. \u00a0Amazon’s bringing Augmented Reality to movies.<\/p>\n Some people are comparing Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs. \u00a0I think that’s a stretch, but more than anyone else who’s jumped into the tablet game since the iPad, he gets it. He’s not making a tablet for the sake of “we need to make a tablet,” he’s making a tablet that serves his company’s interest and provides a smooth and easy portal into Amazon goods and services for his customers. \u00a0Amazon is the first (and to date, really the only) company to meaningfully take advantage of Android’s vaunted “openness” – they’ve used it as a foundation for building an integrated product. \u00a0Which is significantly different from “we need a tablet, here’s an operating system that don’t cost nothin’.”<\/p>\n I guarantee you when Apple goes to bed at night, they don’t worry about Samsung at all. They probably don’t worry too too much about Google or Microsoft yet. But they probably sweat the hell out of Amazon. And well they should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Forget that the $50 annual LTE data plan only gets you 250MB a month (enough to carry me for a week on a tablet, and worthless for streaming). \u00a0Forget that they’ll all have ads on the screen. Forget that the 9-inch model won’t ship until Thanksgiving. \u00a0What Amazon announced yesterday demonstrated that they get what … <\/p>\n