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There’s a new Kindle in town!
Actually, that headline is wrong. There are several new Kindle models and they aren't technically in town until November, but that's besides the main story here! Amazon finally unveiled their updated Kindle lineup last week, with the quite impressive Kindle Fire being their first foray into the land of tablet computing. At least in a way, but the Fire is indeed quite different from the usual non-iPad tablet computers we frequently bump into.
Where others toot their horns loudly and proudly "Yes, sir, we have an Android tablet today" and pack their devices to the brim with all kinds of pre-installed apps and customizations, Amazon did something quite different. In their presentation of the Fire you won't find the word "Android" plastered all over the place like some kind of branding of perceived excellence. In fact, the only real suggestion that the Fire is a device that runs Android in some way, shape or form is that you can get apps via the Amazon Appstore for Android. I't not quite right to think about the Fire as another Android-based tablet, because it isn't!
While a lot of the mainstream media and some tech pundits are screaming "iPad killer" from the top of their lungs, I think there are some problems with painting the Fire as a iPad killer, at least at this given point in time. Not only that I despise the "X killer" nonsense, but for some other, much better reasons than that.
I don't doubt that the Fire will be quite successful in the market and I do believe a lot of people will both buy and enjoy it, but those things does not an "iPad killer" make. One thing that people love to forget is what a massive ecosystem Apple has at their disposal and where said ecosystem is available. Comparably Amazon is a fairly unknown brand in the minds of normal people who don't spend their day immersed in tech stuff. Depending on what geographical market we are talking about, there is little to no Amazon presence. In the US and UK, as well as a few more places Amazon is fairly well known, sure. But for an awful lot of places where you can get an iPad and the Apple ecosystem, there simply is no Amazon and certainly not access to the movies and music that they currently offer only in the US.
Another problem is that right now we have no date for when the Fire will be available anywhere besides the US. Seeing as it is their main market I can understand this and it only makes sense to throughly test a product out before deployment on a global scale. This doesn't remove the fact that for an unknown amount of time the Kindle Fire will be exclusive to the US.
Also, there are some privacy concerns that have yet to be discussed and addressed in conjunction with the otherwise impressive Amazon Silk system. If all your web-surfing goes through Amazon's servers, isn't that a rather creepy proposition? All of a sudden they are more or less actively looking at every single thing you do online as long as you are going to different web pages.
Amusingly enough, the Fire is apparently very similar to the RIM PlayBook in terms of hardware. Difference being that Amazon loaded it full of their software and tweaked the heck out of Android to do all the heavy work under the hood. And would you look at that! It does e-mail, something that the PlayBook to this day sorely misses, unless I didn't catch the memo.
Now don't get me wrong, I do think this is the best and perhaps only real serious competition to the iPad we have seen so far. What Amazon has done with the Fire greatly impresses me and I think it proves that they know how the market works. It's not just something you can butt in on at random without too much afterthought. To be successful, it appears that Amazon understands that you need to be able to offer something that actually makes a big difference. That you are able to get books, movies, music and apps right on your device, without jumping through too many hoops to get there. Seeing it as that, I'm hoping Amazon goes global sooner than later.
Robert Falck
Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.
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Robert Falck