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Amazon Reportedly Aiming For the Low End With a Loss-Leader $50 Tablet

Posted by timothy on from the horses-for-courses dept.

Amazon has been dogged with criticism for its high-end, somewhat oddball phone, but done rather better with its high-end Fire tablets, and has mostly defined the market for e-ink book-reading devices with its long-lived Kindle series. Now, according to a report in the WSJ echoed by Fortune (and by Ars Technica and many others), the company is said to be working on a tablet aimed at the low end of the market, with a 6-inch screen, a mono speaker, and a tiny pricetag -- which could be as low as $50. "At the bottom end of the range at least, the devices won’t be priced to make a profit," writes Fortune. "The dirt-cheap price tag is intended to maximise the reach of its e-book and Amazon Prime video streaming content."

6 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Some tablets have stereo speakers? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >> a mono speaker

    I just read that and thought, "tablets have stereo speakers"? Isn't that what headphones are for? Would having stereo speakers really make a difference on a 9-inch wide device?

    1. Re:Some tablets have stereo speakers? by advocate_one · · Score: 5, Funny

      and sellotape these to each speaker: http://www.machinadynamica.com...

      --
      Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  2. Re:Will it read non-Amazon-sourced books? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's the danger for Amazon. People get them and use them for free stuff. Maybe install Cyanogen instead of the Amazon crapware.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re:Will it read non-Amazon-sourced books? by ncc74656 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Use Calibre to convert from .epub (or whatever) to .azw and upload to Amazon. That's what I did when I needed to keep bookmarks synced between iOS and Android devices (before Google Play Books came along), and it'd also work with Kindle devices.

    --
    20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
  4. Re:Will it read non-Amazon-sourced books? by ssam · · Score: 3, Informative

    Cyanogen Inc and CyanogenMod are separate things.

  5. Re:Amazon owns Woot.com by willworkforbeer · · Score: 4, Funny

    In honor of the good old days of Woot, I searched Amazon for the infamous "Bag O' Crap". Sure enough... http://amzn.com/B0092FJDA2

    --
    Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..