How Will Amazon, Barnes & Noble Survive the iPad Mini?

redletterdave writes "For about a year, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble were almost completely alone in the 7-inch tablet market. It was nice while it lasted. The past few months have seen Google and Microsoft unveil their 7-inch tablet offerings — the Nexus 7 and Microsoft Surface, respectively — and it looks like Apple is about ready to get into the mini tablet game, too. If Apple releases its first 'iPad Mini' next month, what can Amazon and Barnes & Noble do to keep the Cupertino colossus at bay, as well as the other new competitors in the 7-inch tablet game?"

Comments

Who cares?

[jmorris42]

I get really tired of this frame of stories that assume Apple is the alpha and the omega.

Who cares about a possible iPad Mini that isn't drinking the Kool-Aid already? Just another iOS device, they already come with a range of displays, connectivity, etc. If you have already bought into the iOS ecosystem you might want one, otherwise not so much. What other OEM adding a new screen size would be a major story on /.? Newsflash! Dell adds new display option to their laptop line, discuss.

And for that matter, I don't really care about the Amazon or Nook tablets because they are trying to run the same Apple game plan, poorly. I don't want to semi-buy a tethered device that is more a tethered window into it's owner's cloud than a computer that [I] control. And to a great extent I toss the new Google Nexus 7 (by Asus) into the same pile.

Look around and you can buy tablets in any size, build quality and price that can be unlocked, accept removable media, even boot from that external media. Want one with a keyboard? Yup. Good cameras, sensors, etc. How much ya willing to pay? In other words, tablet computers instead of iPad clones. You can keep your subsidized[1] media players; I'm a nerd and I buy computers.

Just don't expect to buy a computer from a media company and get anything useful. Which is what B&N and Amazon are, Apple is in the process of becoming and Google is greatly desiring to be.

[1] Well not subsidized from Apple of course, there you pay more for the chains... but they are just so stylish!

Re:Who cares?

[Bogtha]

Who cares about a possible iPad Mini that isn't drinking the Kool-Aid already?

Pretty much everybody, because whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, Apple defined this market with the iPad. You say it yourself, all the major competitors are basically following Apple's lead. Every tablet from every competitor is compared to the iPad in reviews. The tablet market was practically non-existent before the iPad was released. It's not so much a tablet market as an iPad market with a few hangers on.

Re:Who cares?

[Papaspud]

iPod touches are $199 +, no way they are going to be less than that. I'm thinking more along the lines of $299+.........

Re:Who cares?

[Just Some Guy]

I don't have an iPhone or an iPod. I have an HTC Desire and a Sandisk Sansa (with Rockbox). What do people say to me?

"Hipster." I have a Sansa with Rockbox, too, but stopped using it approximately the first time I ever saw an iPod Touch.

I don't believe there actually is a tablet market. Just an iPad market. No one wants tablets, just something that makes them look cool and hip. Like everyone else.

Well, that's just precious! In the real world, people love tablets. There are a lot of people who want portable, Internet-capable devices without lugging around laptops. I'm sure there's some tiny portion of the tablet market who likes being seen with them, but the owners I've seen tend to use them while lounging around their houses watching Netflix or playing games.

Note: I don't have an iPad and I'm not defending my own purchasing decisions. I have a Nook Simple Touch that I use purely as an ebook reader because I don't really have a need for anything else between my phone and laptop. But it's sheer ignorance to claim that tablets are a fad just because you don't like them. Lots of people do, and manufacturers have made a few billion dollars selling them without an end in sight.

Re:Who cares?

[AK Marc]

The tablet market was like turbos in cars. GM did them in the '60s so bad that nobody wanted them again. Even with the Turbo Trans Am in the '80s, that failed miserably. Then companies like Saab and Volvo had turbos everywhere and did fine, beating GM in price, economy, and performance with turbos.

I used tablets in the '90s. They were heavy (heavier than laptops). They were slow (speced similar to low-end laptops). And they were expensive (priced similar to high-end laptops). And the OS sucked. Mostly windows where a touch was a click, and dragging was neigh impossible. They required styluses. The few that were bought were very limited in scope (the only deployment I saw was for doctors, or places with test units).

So, every time someone said "tablet" after that, it was slow, heavy, expensive, like "turbo" meant oil-burning and unreliable. Until someone came in and did it right, without regards to what had come before. Apple created the tablet market. There had been tablets before, but no market for them. There was a market for them like touchpad and touchpoint are separate markets. It was a funky laptop market until Apple stepped in and showed everyone else how it was done. Well, the Kindle may have made a name for itself, but it was a reader, not a tablet.

Re:Who cares?

[Golden_Rider]

I went with a kindle instead of an iPad not for the price and not for the size, but because of the eInk display. It makes for a much nicer reading than any display I had sofar. Of course this makes the kindle solely a book-reading device. But for this, it's close to optimal.

Have to agree here. I, too, have a Kindle (the older non-touch one), and it is close to perfect for reading text. Which is what I personally want to do with my "reader device", I could not care less about a colour display or web browsing / facebooking / whatever. I just want to read books I purchase on amazon or texts/manga I upload via USB. The eInk display is absolutely perfect for that, especially when reading outdoors on a sunny day - but even indoors, it feels (at least to me) far more comfortable on the eyes than a backlit display.

If Apple a new "iPad Mini", it will probably have some uber awesome "retina" display and cost upwards of $300 - and any ebook reader with an eInk display will still be better for reading books and have a longer battery life, too.

Surface is 10 inch.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The past few months have seen Google and Microsoft unveil their 7-inch tablet offerings — the Nexus 7 and Microsoft Surface, respectively"

Nope. Surface is a 10 inch tablet.

Eink

[sehryan]

Put the focus back where it belongs for their particular devices - Eink.

There are a ton of people who don't want to look at yet another computer screen when they are reading, which is why those people (me included) go for the Eink devices instead of the 7" tablets.

That is the space that made them popular, and that is the space they need to put the focus back on as a differentiating - and positive selling - factor.

Re:Eink

[Havenwar]

I'm almost ashamed to mention but you might not have noticed the slight flaw in your comment there. 12 is actually less than 30. The point of the E-ink devices are the longer battery life, specifically because they don't have to be recharged every night. You might be tied to an outlet yourself, but some of us actually leave such luxuries behind for more than 12 hours in a row at times, and then a less power hungry device for a very low-tech task is quite appreciated.

You can bring an e-ink device with you camping for a week and get a few hours reading in every day. Can't do that with a tablet. Plus you can read it in full sunshine! And yes, it doesn't have a backlight so it's useless in the dark... but then a separate little campinglight works quite well and uses a lot less energy per hour used than all the extra power a tablet uses just to keep that screen glowing.

So it's no contest, really, if all you want to do is read OR if you want to be able to stay away for a few days without having to hit a power outlet... then it's E-ink all the way. It's apples and oranges.

Re:Why should they care?

[shutdown -p now]

If Kindle hardware sales dry up due to competition from other tables, it's not a problem as long as the other devices that people buy support the Kindle App.

The problem is that Apple has slowly been making it harder to make its devices sale channels (unless you're willing to pay the Apple tax). Not only they forced Amazon to remove in-app book purchasing, they even made them to remove the button that would take the user to Amazon's Kindle web store in the browser. Right now Kindle app on iOS is a plain reader only, and you have to know where to buy the books on your own.

On the other hand, there's iBooks, which is more prominently there (every iOS device bugs you to install iBooks as soon as you open the app store), and lets you browse the books and buy them, not just read them. I suspect Apple is diverting quite a few iOS users who'd otherwise go to Amazon that way.