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2011-09-30 13:39:24
Sep 28th 2011, 22:35 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO
"WE ARE building premium products and offering them at non-premium prices,"
crowed Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, as he unveiled a collection of new
Kindle devices on September 28th. Among them was the Kindle Fire, which
represents the company s first foray into the tablet-computing market. Priced
at a mere $199, the new device, which has a seven-inch colour touch-screen,
could pose the biggest threat yet to Apple s iPad, which has dominated the
tablet arena since its launch last year. Amazon also launched several new
black-and-white Kindle e-readers, including one costing just $79.
Many other companies, including South Korea s Samsung, Canada s Research in
Motion (the maker of BlackBerry phones) and America s Hewlett-Packard, have
tried and failed to dislodge Apple. Although the company s share of the overall
tablet market has shrunk somewhat, it is still huge. Gartner, a research firm,
reckons that Apple will account for nearly three-quarters of the 64m tablets
that it estimates will be sold this year. But if there is one company that can
cause the denizens of Apple s headquarters to lose some sleep at night it is
undoubtedly Amazon.
Admittedly, the Kindle Fire, which will be available in America in
mid-November, has some handicaps. The device does not offer mobile
connectivity, only a Wi-Fi link. Nor does it have a built-in camera or
microphone for things such as video-chatting. And its screen is smaller than
that of the iPad, though the quality of its graphic display is impressive.
Amazon will no doubt roll out new versions in due course that rectify the Fire
s shortcomings and make further improvements to it. (The first iPad, launched
last year, also lacked a camera.)
In the meantime, the new device has plenty of things in its favour. One is its
price, which is way below that of the cheapest iPad, a Wi-Fi-only model that
costs $499. Another advantage is that it will be aggressively promoted on
Amazon.com, the online mall, which has a vast audience and has acted as a
highly effective launch pad for the firm s e-readers. Amazon has also developed
an app store for the device, which runs on a highly customised version of
Google s Android operating system. That means popular apps such as "Angry
Birds" will run on the device.
Perhaps the Fire s biggest advantage is access to Amazon's oodles of digital
content, including over 100,000 movies and TV shows, over 17m songs and more
than 1m e-books, all held in Amazon s computing cloud . This cloud will also
be helpful in other respects. The Fire has just eight gigabytes of memory
(which helps keep down costs) because Amazon is assuming that people will keep
most of their stuff in its free cloud service. And the Fire will take advantage
of a novel technology called Amazon Silk, which uses the power of Amazon s
cloud-computing infrastructure to help make web-browsing faster, by reducing
the amount of processing that needs to be done on the device itself. None of
this makes the Fire a sure-fire success. But it does make it a credible
pretender to the iPad s throne.