Amazon To Launch Kindle Tablet?

Rumors abound that Amazon wants a taste of the tablet market and will unveil a Kindle Tablet later this week. The prevailing thought is Amazon will offer a device that will cost under $300 and will tether closely to its music, movie and digital book content. From the article: "Amazon has brand recognition, a bevy of existing loyal Kindle e-reader owners, and a Web-based e-commerce platform that includes one-click access to buying e-books, movies, digital music downloads, its own Android app store, and streaming media catalog. That adds up to Amazon being uniquely suited to go head-to-head with Apple in the tablet market and become a formidable competitor across the industry."

Comments

Re:Possible and likely.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We'll have to see what Amazon does; but B&N has been about as far from "locking" as one is likely to find among android devices. By default, they'll try to boot from the (external) microSD slot first, then the internal flash if they don't find anything bootable. Aside from the usual peculiarities of embedded ARM boards, it's almost like dealing with a real computer!

Re:Possible and likely.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Amazon's competition here is B&N or rather Amazon is introducing a product to compete with B&N's offering. Apple is in a completely different area.

Amazon and iTunes are competing on Music and Video downloads. If they're tossing the E-Ink display, they most certainly are competing with Apple.

Useful?

[vlm]

will tether closely to its music, movie and digital book content

Before purchase, I thought I'd use my ipad for that, because that's what marketing said; After purchase, I never do. Its an absolutely killer email reader, a fantastic web browser, great pdf reader (manuals, etc). I play games on it occasionally. Avadon etc. My coworkers have about the same story... repeating the marketers mantra before purchase of consume consume consume media, yet after purchase it's entirely different, electronic paper plus some video games.

There is quite a separation between what the marketing people demand I purchase it for, and what I've seen people actually use it for after purchase. I have a good feeling about it because the actual use turns out to be more valuable than I was expecting.

Amazon might want to watch out; if competitors start marketing toward what tablets are actually used for, they might get left in the dust. Someday I'll want to buy a replacement for my ipad, at that time I'm going to jump at advertisements for "instant on" and "great email reader" and "really awesome webbrowser" and "smooth pdf rendering". I'm going to avoid advertisements about how this is the 50th media format I should buy a full collection of Beetles music on, or how I should re-purchase my complete DVD collection (again) for their new gadget, because that simply didn't work out as an interest for me on my current tablet.

Re:Useful?

[DrVomact]

will tether closely to its music, movie and digital book content

Before purchase, I thought I'd use my ipad for that, because that's what marketing said; After purchase, I never do. Its an absolutely killer email reader, a fantastic web browser, great pdf reader (manuals, etc). I play games on it occasionally. Avadon etc. ... I'm going to avoid advertisements about how this is the 50th media format I should buy a full collection of Beetles music on, or how I should re-purchase my complete DVD collection (again) for their new gadget, because that simply didn't work out as an interest for me on my current tablet.

Isn't that the heart of the problem? Everyone wants to sell media, but they all want to sell it in a proprietary format through proprietary channels so that they can control the media you buy. It's like having to buy paper books printed in such a way that you have to wear special decoding glasses to read—and of course, you can only buy the books from the glasses vendor, because other vendor's books won't be properly decoded. This is stupid, and I'm not switching to e-books until a reasonably wide selection of books is available in an open format from diverse vendors, and there is a selection of e-book readers (or tablet PCs or whatever you want to call them) available that will work with this format. The format itself could be something pretty simple: XHTML with user-customizeable styles, and maybe PNG graphics.

Re:FAIL

[IANAAC]

Like everyone says: There is no *tablet* market, there's an *iPad* market ....

I'm not so sure. There's an "iPad market" because Apple has done a fantastic job of marketing it. The long line of failed android tablets you refer to are still out there being sold, though.

All it'll take is a big enough company to put some serious marketing (and aggressive pricing) into their android tablet. Then you'll start to see more than just iPads in Starbucks. As it stands now, android is capable of doing everything iOS does on the same or lower hardware.\

If there's a company that could do it, it would probably be Amazon. They're big enough, and they have a large catalog of all sorts of media to back up whatever they come up with.

Re:Possible and likely.

[MimeticLie]

B&N seems entirely more committed to openness and interoperability than Amazon. The Kindle can't use EPUB files for instance (and no, the existance of Calibre doesn't make up for Amazon trying to lock down its platform, no matter how much Amazon's apologists wish it would). I seriously doubt we'll ever see the same level of hardware openness from Amazon that we see from B&N.

Re:$300 is too much

[0123456]

Users who don't read for more than an hour at a time perhaps.

Or outdoors.

Re:FAIL

[Courageous]

Amazon is in the position of being able to loss-lead their tablet. As the HP tablet experience shows, price it low enough and even a bricklet will sell.