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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.
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.
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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 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)
3G support means nothing to me. I use WiFi or nothing. If I'm on the go and I need WiFi for my e-Reader and there's no hot-spots my phone provides one.
Really, I've got enough books stored up in advanced I could go a month of reading and not run out of books I've already downloaded.
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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.
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.
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?
...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 got a Nook Simple Touch used in new condition (AFAICT) and rooted it the day I got it. $75 with the charger, box, etc etc. And the e-ink display is surprisingly useful to me even though there is no color. I'm using Opera Mobile because B&N somehow managed to bone the stock browser and Opera Mini is poop and Firefox won't run on it at all. Most apps seem to work OK, except for the market search, so you use searchmarket. And Youtube, if you log in you can't use it. But you can't watch videos on the display anyway.
Probably that's why you're not willing to spend money on a device with an e-Ink display, but it's still pretty great.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
You're going to wait how long?
That's dumb. We're talking about a few hundred dollars. You probably spent that much on a GPU in the last year or two.
I spent that much on lunch last month.
PDF is a problem. ePub is better.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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.
Plus $99 per year to enable installation of applications from unknown sources, if that's your thing.
If that was your thing, you probably wouldn't have chose the iPad.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
Read your own text, you want to install applications from unknown sources. FAIL
How many people buy an android device and do that?
Anybody who used Amazon Appstore before the Kindle Fire came out, for one thing.
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.