Why an Amazon tablet can rival the iPad - TNW Mobile - 0 views
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Without so much as a whisper from the retailer itself, Amazon’s Android tablet is heading our way. Rumoured to launch at the end of the third quarter in time for the holiday season, Amazon is hoping it can steal a little of Apple’s thunder and steal a little of its market share.
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Amazon’s decision to launch an Appstore was a surprising one, especially because there was no shortage of alternative Android marketplaces at the time. Incorporating its patented recommendation system and its “Free App A Day”, the third-party application store won many fans in the US primarly because it has been providing customers with downloads of some of the most popular Android apps and games.
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Amazon is one of, if not the world’s number one Cloud storage and service provider and is seen by many to have led the march towards the Cloud, with affordable and reliable online services that even the most bootstrapped startups could afford. Asserting itself in the hosting market has helped the company make the best of its other web-based services, namely online music downloads and its new Android Appstore.
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Amazon’s DRM-free downloads are not only be cheaper but they will work on a range of different devices – including an iPod – so if a tablet buyer has music on the mind, an Amazon tablet would be a good place to start, after-all it’s a brand trusted by millions all over the world.
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Amazon, despite not having a device to backup to its Cloud, pipped Apple to the punch with the launch of the Amazon Cloud Player. The service isn’t necessarily revolutionary (it requires a user to upload their entire music collection to an online digital locker or synchronise new Amazon MP3 purchases), but it provides a dedicated storage platform for a user’s music, regardless of where they bought it. In fact, users can upload any file they wish to the service.
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Apple’s closest competitor in the mobile industry is Google, a company that develops and maintains the fastest growing mobile operating system on the planet. But even Google was forced to admit that its Honeycomb operating system was not up to standard, having previously condemned vendors for creating tablet devices that ran Android builds that were specifically tailored for smartphones.
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Because Google has restricted the use of alternative apps on its operating system, Amazon requires the user to download the app to their smartphone or their tablet before they can browse or download apps. This poses a risk for the company in the general market but if it intends on releasing its own tablet, it can bundle the necessary software (including its MP3 store and Cloud Player service) before the device is even powered-on by its owner.
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In July the previous year, Amazon announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year. According to Jeff Bezos, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon was selling, it was selling 143 Kindle eBooks. In just the U.S. Kindle Store alone, there were more than 810,000 books.
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Kindle fans worried that Amazon would kill its e-ink reader, don’t worry. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has already said “we will always be very mindful that we will want a dedicated reading device.” Throughout the article I have referred to the Amazon tablet as a singular. However, there it is highly likely that Amazon will release a family of tablets; one a 10-inch model and a smaller, more portable 7-inch tablet. Chinese sources have indicated that both devices will sport LCD touchscreens, but in the very near future will move to technologies that will be able to switch between e-ink and a colour LCD screen.
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Analysts have already issued reports suggesting Amazon will sell 2.4 million tablets in 2012. Whilst that figure doesn’t even compete with the 10-12 million iPads that Apple is expected to sell in its third quarter alone, Amazon has time on its side. By subsidising its devices, it can heavily reduce its offerings to get customers investing into its technologies, hitting them with the upsell once they are onboard. Amazon can push its value-added services to boost revenues, whilst slowly building sales of physical devices.