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Kindle Fire Grabs Over Half of the U.S. Android Tablet Market
New submitter DillyTonto writes "Amazon got shelled by analysts and the press after releasing a buggy first iteration of the Fire edition of the Kindle e-reader. Three weeks later the Kindle Fire owned 14 percent of the whole market for tablets. Three months later, more than half of all Android tablets sold in the U.S. are seven-inch Kindle Fires, despite a huge bias among buyers for 10-inch tablets. How could a heavily modded e-reader beat full-size tablets by major PC vendors? It's cheaper than any other tablet or e-reader on the market, for one thing. Also important is its focus on being an e-reader, 'because people buy hardware to have access to one app or function, then take the other things it can do as an additional benefit.'"
I think that better marketing, and tie-in to the Amazon eBook store also played huge factors. Otherwise the Nook Color would have dominated long ago, as it has all the same benefits they tout about the Kindle Fire, but released much earlier and was a more polished product at the time of the Kindle Fire release.
What else do most consumers?
I think it's just the right size. I imagine that most of the customers wanted something its size to begin with.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
that being "why would you want to buy a tablet?".
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
1. The Fire is not a 'heavily modded e-reader'. E-book readers are traditionally e-paper devices, the Fire is an Android tablet with e-reader functionality highlighted in the software. You can make a tablet an e-reader, but the other way around, not so much.
2. If more than half the Android tablets sold are 7 inch, then there is no bias among buyers for 10 inch tablets in that category. If you're talking about the entire tablet market, then of course it's 10 inch - the iPad still has more than half the tablet market *in units*.
All that said, the last part is spot on - it's being marketed as an e-reader with extra features (woo, color!), not as a tablet... even thought that's exactly what it is. A lot of people still don't know what they want from a tablet, but they know what they want from an e-reader. If it does more stuff, all the better. If they want a tablet... statistically speaking, they're already buying an iPad.
Hmm, maybe the price had a little more to do with it?
I'm waiting for the google tablet,
If I'm going to limit myself to a 7" tablet I'm going to get the Nook. Same processor, twice the on-board storage, twice the RAM, has an SD slot, just as hackable and can run the Kindle app.
Cost the same.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
They answered the right question, that being "why would you want to buy a tablet?".
And they delivered at the right price. It seemed that most other tablets were in the price neighborhood of the iPad, so people naturally just got an iPad because of the iPad's perception of having more features and apps. With the Kindle Fire coming in at such a relatively lower price they overcame this perception of the iPad.
I am an iPad dev and when I played with a Kindle Fire at a family Christmas dinner I thought it was a pretty cool device well worth the price, any performance differences or missing apps were more than offset by the price.
despite a huge bias among buyers for 10-inch tablets.
What he really meant was, despite a huge bias among buys for the APPLE IPAD
Not $430 lower. $300 lower. (The $629 iPad is the 4G model, the Wi-Fi only model is just $499)
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I'm ridiculously happy with my Le Pan tablet, however, which for $200 is a steal. Great viewable angle, phenomenal battery life, a good investment for my needs (casual web surfing on my coffee table).
expandfairuse.org
My conclusion here is that price is more important than specifications or features. At least in this case perhaps.
I have a Xoom and find nothing horrendously wrong with it. The price was right ($300 for tablet + 32GB + sleeve + multimedia charging dock w/ loudspeakers); it runs gReader, UPnP, Chrome, K9 Mail... perfectly well, and reads all SD videos with no issues which, given the size of the screen, is sufficient. HD videos don't work though.
I'm trying to find a reason to discard it and get a newer one, but can't really imagine what more I could be doing with a more recent tablet. Even on my 22" desktop, I'm watching SD videos, so that alone is not enough to warrant an upgrade.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I have a six year old and a four year old. No way I was getting them a $500 or even $300 device. At $199 the Kindle Fire was perfect. And it is the first thing the eldest asks for on waking and returning home from school...
I'd love to see the numbers behind this.
After all, "comScore is excited to introduce our next generation Device Essentials product, which provides new insight into digital device usage and detailed reporting of traffic patterns within local markets,” said Serge Matta, comScore president of mobile & operator solutions. “These new insights are invaluable to all stakeholders in the mobile ecosystem as they seek to provide valuable services and optimize the mobile media experience for their customers."
Yeah, we all trust the numbers of someone trying to sell us a service based on those numbers.
Considering all of the idiotic reports of your GDrive info being used for advertising and the AT&T shareholders voting down net neutrality going around lately - the blatantly false tech story seems to be all the rage lately...
What they really meant is what 'they' printed.
For all of 2011, Apple shipped 40.49 million iPads, up from 15.1 million in 2010 and good for a market share of 62%. Runner-up for the year was Samsung, which shipped 6.11 million Galaxy Tabs, or 9% of the total 65.19 million tablets shipped last year.
The Kindle Fire, out for less than two months last year, still shipped 6% of all tablets in 2010, finishing third overall.
What seems readily apparent to me that there is no "Android market." Buyers reward the perception of functionality, they don't care what OS the device runs as long as fulfills their desire for functionality. At the end of the day, I know of not one buyer who really took the time to understand nuanced differences between Android based tablets, and it's not so amazing that Apple, with its superior understanding of user expectations and experience rules the tablet market.
After all, it matters not whether you buy a Kindle or iPad if you want to surf the web, shop online, listen to music watch a video or read a book. But it does matter to the ecosystem of sellers which device you bought.
The real question is, why do people continue to buy the iPad at 10:1 over the Kindle? Are they knowingly paying for superior, trouble free use, has Apple's dominance in creative media translated into better sales for media consumption, or is the fact that they've won the hearts and minds of youth through their success in the educational market translating into success in the tablet market.
Geeks may think that hackability is cool, but most consumers I know want a tool to work as advertised, and Apple actually makes the interface kind of fun in ways their competition has never fully grasped. I think the chickens are coming home to Cupertino because Apples HIG and focus on usability have proven to be the right way.
Android is still a baby compared to Macintosh.
I dunno if I agree. The Galaxy Tab ain't bad, really. I prefer my iPad, but I don't have any real serious complaints about the Tab. It even has a few things going for it, for example I can actually get emulators through the market. Can't do that with Apple, not without jailbreaking anyway.
I do think it's a problem of marketing. If you go to Best Buy, for example, you get a nice big display of what the iPad can do for you. When you go to the next aisle, there's something like 20 machines somewhat iPad'ish in shape all with varying price-tags, but none significantly lower than the iPad. I think the casual shopper would walk past that aisle and think "ah, a failed-to-be-cheaper-clone."
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
won't work (for app/doc downloads) outside the US without tethering.
3G? US only.
I was willing to shell out for one last week whilst on a visit to CA. The B&N assistant told me of its limitations. Apparently they have sold a good number of devices to Non US residents and taken the flak from them when they find it does not work when they get home.
Amazon has yet to launch the fire in my local market. Their US store would not ship one to me without a US Zip code & US Credit Card billing address.
A plague on both their companies.
If I'm going to limit myself to a 7" tablet I'm going to get the Nook. Same processor, twice the on-board storage, twice the RAM, has an SD slot, just as hackable and can run the Kindle app.
Cost the same.
I'm waiting for all of that AND color epaper - eInk -iInk- iPaper-ei-ei-O AND under $100.
I give it 5 years - 10 years tops for it to happen.
I can wait. I've been quite fine for a few decades without tablet computers or eReaders or electronic books or any of that stuff.
The only reason I'm even considering it is that I tried a friend's Nook and I like the layout and form factor over a book. Toss in the elimination of the clutter of having a shit load of books and having the convenience of downloading a book from the library (hopefully one day all their books will be available and in a form other than PDF - PDF sucks for readind electronically. It was designed for PRINTING not READING on a SCREEN.)
Now look what you made me do! The onion fell off my belt!
Let's compare the devices that are actually somewhat comparable: 2nd gen iPad is $399.
Right. I'm perfectly happy with my Xoom from the hardware point of view and look forward to Android sucking less over time. The only thing that will move me off this is a 12 inch tablet.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
low price because Amazon was selling at a loss or near loss, they want you to buy media for the Fire. They made an Android tablet that wasn't marketed as an Android tablet, but people hacked it into one, which is something that Amazon will block or the price will rise. Simply put, unmodded, it's average, modded, it's better than other Android tablets.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
The Fire and iPad are known because of the press they receive. Other then that tablets are sold by word of mouth. Not only for quality tablets but for features.
For example, after reading specs and reviews on the Fire I'm not sure whether or not it comes with Gorilla glass, but I suspect a lot of people will want a tablet that does.
This lack of sense of features means that "all tablets are the same" excpet for price, size and color.
The idea that people don't care about specs is just bullshit. Car companies spend a lot of their advertising busgets putting out specs--#cyclinders ( cores ), mpg ( flash memory size, battery life ), acceleration, "comfortably seats six" ( can store ten HD movies ), "has this fold down rear compartment" ( can use SD cards for extra storage )...
The thing is that people don't yet understand the specs for tablets. It takes some time for people to figure out they want more cores ... ( Hey how come you can read a document and play Angry birds at the same time? When I try that my tablet bogs down--You have two cores I have six ), SD slots, storage etc.
I had purchased a Nook e-ink refurb a few months before I received the Fire as a gift. I tried the Fire for reading for a few months and it became obvious that it was much more tiring on the eyes versus the Nook.
The rest of the functionality of the Fire was lacking, as you don't have access to Google Play. It was relatively painless to root and flash, so I went to CM9 (ICS) on it. CM9 is missing hardware acceleration, so I flashed CM7 (Gingerbread). It's fairly functional as a normal tablet. There is quite a bit of developer support on xda-developers.
I must be the only Fire owner who doesn't care about its e-book capability. I already have (what they're now calling) a Kindle Keyboard -- I read using that.
I got the Fire to access the video streaming that I get with my Amazon Prime subscription, and to play a few app games on something bigger than the iPhone. It's doing those activities just fine. I have no need or desire to hack it to or with anything.
I must be one of those extremely atypical buyers of a product that just uses the damn thing.
Which is why eventually the number of Android tablets will surpass the IPAD, even though Apple will still make
tons of money at the high end.
The secret of the Kindle Fire is that for now they have found the sweet spot of android tablets. A high enough price
not to be junk and a low enough price to compete against Ipad and the Fires secret sauce...the backing of amazon.com
who has the customer service and the money and wont cut and run which gives buyers confidence
Also Amazon.com unlike the other tablet sellers built up gradually from a successful inexpensive e-reader
instead of just trying to come up with a "Our version of the ipad"
.
The framing here is that the Kindle Fire has more than half of the "Android tablet market," but that's a framing that only makes sense to those who follow technology closely and care heavily about Android. This says less about the strength of the Kindle Fire than it does about the fact that there isn't much of an Android tablet market. There's an iPad market. And there's a market for specialized devices such as the Kindle. But that's about it. The vast majority of Kindle Fire owners wouldn't even think of themselves as owning an Android tablet. They simply own a Kindle. There just aren't that many people who want a non-iPad tablet unless it's a specialized device (as they see the Fire), IMO. Unless you're an Android enthusiast, there's no reason to specifically look at an Android tablet.
In the long run Apple may also be in the middle, not just the high end. If they follow the same pattern that they demonstrated with the iPod and iPhone then when a 4th generation iPad shows up at the $500 price point, the 3rd generation iPad may be offered at $400 and the iPad 2 at $300.
Of course I am curious as to why the original iPad was simply retired. Perhaps there were cost or performance issues in the long term.
Unless you really need a mm to be a mm, it doesn't make a difference. And if you do, your needs are likely too specialized for the market to prioritize.
People tend to lose visual acuity as they age, and a lot of people are halfway blind to begin with. If the needs of senior citizens and people with disabilities are "too specialized for the market", what should be done to accommodate such users?
2nd gen iPad is $399
Plus $99 per year to enable installation of applications from unknown sources, if that's your thing.
Here's how.
Geek needs are a niche.
Will you blithering idiots ever get out of your little bubble and figure this stuff out?
...it has the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Especially after I got it for the $140 re-furb sale they had a few weeks ago, and threw Ice Cream Sandwich on it. Wish it had a camera sometimes, but otherwise I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a cheap tablet.
i live - the low-end Nook is a much better deal
I love my NT, I got a color before the Fire was ever released.
Many of the Ebooks I have are PDFs from DriveThruRPG, so color was a requirement and the Fire wasn't even an option at the time.
Now the Fire seemed, and still does seem when comparing it to the NTs & Colors, like an "Oh shit, people want this? We have to slap something together and get it out for the holiday season."
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
First, Depends on where you choose to place your standards. Mine include standard ports, extensible/removable storage, and USB device/host mode. As you said, the Xoom is great at $299, especially with 64GB total, a dock, and a sleeve. An equivalent iPad would have set me back about 3x more, not including all proprietary cables and doodads, and extra Apps I've already purchased on Android.. I'm not sure what functionality you're thinking of.. it's sure harder and more expensive to connect an Ipad to/from stuff than a Xoom, with its standard ports, free UPnP/DLNA, cheap SDs, USB or Wifi keyboard and mouse and gamepad...
I'm really curious about what functionality you're thinking of, if you care to expand ?
Second, I don't really care about performance. I don't game in my tablet, mainly browse/read and watch video, so performance has been "good enough" for me for a while. I still have an original Nook Color, which I find OK too, though too small for at-home use.
Lastly, you overgeneralize: some Android phones have clearly superior features: my Note's AMOLED screen is both bigger, more contrasted, less tiring on the eyes, and more beautiful than the iPhone's unusable (to my old eyes), stamp-size, glow-in-the-dark LCD screen. Also, you seem to forget that Asus is also pushing keyboard docks that some people seem to love, and that quad-core is not only about performance, but also about battery life.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
how about this: it fits in your pocket & you can hold it with one hand, just like a book.
When the Fire first came out, it was not a bad deal.
But now, you can get a real 7" android tablet for the same, or less. A real tablet can do everything the Fire can do, and much more.
Go to slickdeals.net, and find an Acer Iconia, or HTC Flyer, or Asus Transformer, or Vizio 8" or whatever, for $200 or less.
Why bother with eReaders like Fire, or Nook?
I see real 7" Android tablets for $200 or less all the time. Go to slickdeals.net, there's always something.
(Score:0)
Please respond.
In both cases it is the ecosystem, not the hardware that rules the day. Anyone that did not see how the Fire was going to be successful does not understand consumers.
Pwned that fuckin apple fanboi! Bravo!
Because its marketed as a color reader, priced as a color reader (well below typical tablet prices), from the leading reader vendor, and, oh yeah, the reader market was something like an order of magnitude bigger than the tablet market in number of units being sold, and growing faster than the tablet market, even before the Kindle Fire was released.
Except, no, its not. Even if you only mean tablets and color e-readers as opposed to traditional e-ink e-readers, its more expensive than B&N's Nook Color, and the same price as B&N's Nook Tablet, and more expensive than numerous other inexpensive tablets..And if you don't restrict it that way, its even less true, as there are plenty of much cheaper e-ink e-readers.
To my experience most of the tablets/ebook readers are either limited (for example djvu format is usually missing), have a poor display, or are just too heavy to use (the iPad for example has an excellent display, but for me it is too heavy to be used as a book replacement). The Kindle Fire seems to me just a pretty good device, that encompasses all the limitations of other devices. Unfortunately here it is not yet available on the shelves but I want to try it as soon as possible. I only regret it has no webcam for skype.
I expect the galaxy tab 2 to take a huge chunk from amazon $50 more and it has a front facing camera, a back camera, and a microSD slot.
The Thermidorians stopped a murderous regime *dead* in it's tracks and gave us the metric system. "I'll give them that." I'd give them everything.