Amazon is poised on the brink on making a tremendous impact to the world of tablets. No tablet manufacturer has yet managed to create a product with a cohesive ecosystem, aggressive marketing, and fluidity of operation of the iPad. However, Amazon’s upcoming entry into the market could change all of that. Since the introduction of Apple’s iPad, the tech world has been struggling to keep up. Though tablets have existed in some form or another for over a decade, the iPad was the first tablet to bring the format to consumers. No matter what the Apple-haters and iPad-naysayers say, the birth of Apple’s tablet profoundly shook the gadget world. Never had a device made an impact as significant since the iPod.
Google changed the direction of Android to come out with a not quite up-to-par Honeycomb, Samsung rushed out the 7” Galaxy Tab with a non-tablet version of Android (Froyo at its inception), and various smaller manufacturers like Viewsonic, Archos, and the like came out with Froyo tablets as well. Today’s landscape is a bit better-rounded, with Honeycomb finally stable and on great products like the Asus Transformer and controversial Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, RIM’s Blackberry Playbook, and even HP’s maligned TouchPad.
Amazon’s upcoming tablet could be the one that can make a significant market share impact on Apple. What Amazon first and foremost has is its all-in-one store with one account for everything. Using your Amazon account, you can access music, Amazon Instant Video, Amazon’s own AppStore, and obviously Kindle books. While HTC and Samsung have tried to leverage their own movie and music stores, Amazon is already the strongest competitor to iTunes and has a huge installed subscriber base. One-click purchasing for literally everything a user could want- from the latest Ke$ha song to a pair of boots definitely puts Amazon at an advantage.
One of the other issues Google and its ilk have been having trouble with is price. With the iPad priced at $499, many competitors originally followed suit. However, one quick look at market share tells you how well that went. In fact, the second best selling tablet, the HP TouchPad, came to its glory due to HP’s $99 firesale of its remaining stock. Amazon’s purported price of its tablet, which will probably be called the Kindle, would be around $250, like the Barnes and Noble Nook Color. What would separate the Kindle from the chintzy and single-purpose tablets at this price-range would be full-fledged functionality, excellent build quality, and quite possibly a free subscription of Amazon Prime (Amazon’s free two-day shipping for its products), and access to its Instant Videos. While the recently-introduced, Gingerbread-equipped, Lenovo IdeaPad A1, and Vizio Tablet might bring some competition, Amazon’s offering will be more complete in terms of content and pack a bigger name.
With Amazon promoting its tablet on the front page of Amazon.com like it has with the e-ink Kindle in the past, as well as putting out some awesome advertisements on TV, this new Kindle could sell extremely well. Why buy a device where you need to pick up all the pieces (movies, music, apps, books) in different places when you can have an integrated Amazon experience for half the price of an iPad? I can’t imagine the average Joe buying an Android tablet over this. At this price range, a Kindle could also be a more easily considered gift, where other tablets are cost-prohibitive. We’ll see how much of a splash the Amazon Kindle tablet makes when it launches (hopefully in October) but my bet is that it will be the most successful of the iPad competitors.
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