Kindle Fire: Take three tablets and call me in the morning
I love the Kindle Fire tablet launched today, even though I have yet to touch one. I love the $199 price, the clever browser (more about that below, it may surprise you), the tight integration, the application, book and video marketplace, the small size, I even like the limited features compared with an iPad. The Kindle Fire is perfect… for my kids. I’ll be buying three of them for Christmas.
Right now my boys, ages 5, 7 and 9 all have iPod Touches that have served them well despite having been many times lost, spilled on, and in one case very lightly driven over by a car. But the Touches, which also cost $199 as I recall, are getting old, their batteries recharged so many times to where they now barely last an hour. It’s time for something new, which in the eyes of my boys means something better.
In this instance bigger is better and the Kindle Fire is certainly bigger. My boys don’t need 3G or 4G, they don’t need a camera (I don’t want to see my seven year-old running a webcam business), what they need is a video machine with ebooks, light surfing capability and cool games. The only part I am unsure about with the Kindle Fire is those games, but I also know that Amazon isn’t stupid. Even the limited marketplace is an advantage in my view because it will probably do a good job at vetting content, protecting my kids.
Analysts will wonder how the Kindle Fire will affect iPad sales. It has to. I’ll be buying three Kindles, for example, rather than one iPad. So I’m predicting Amazon will have a hit and Apple will take a hit, but so what? Wasn’t something like this going to come along eventually anyway? If Amazon mightily validates the smaller form factor so scorned by Steve Jobs, you can bet Apple will follow with a seven-incher of its own. Game on!
What I’m not sure I see coming from this, frankly, is any boost for Android, which is hiding somewhere inside the Kindle Fire, potentially generating royalties only for Microsoft.
But this can only be good for consumers and I like what’s good for consumers. Maybe the aggressive pricing and fair feature set will incite Apple to new greatness. It probably will.
Now about that Amazon Silk browser that is being touted as so revolutionary and key to the Kindle Fire’s supposedly snappy behavior (remember I haven’t touched one): it’s clever, but not revolutionary at all. In fact, for all the gee whiz technical claims of Amazon this exact same technology has been used by thousands of rural Internet users for more than a decade.
The power of Amazon Silk that allows the Kindle Fire to need only eight gigs of local storage is its integration with Amazon S3 storage and EC2 cloud services. S3 will hold a copy of all data in the cloud for free while EC2 will run a smart application proxy that will cache, prefetch, and transcode data on behalf of the Kindle Fire user with the help of massive computing resources on that backend and gigantic data pipes. Where a dynamic page might require 20 or more DNS hits and data grabs, we’re told, the Kindle Fire will do all that via EC2 making the actual page generation a single grab at WiFi speeds, the page having been pre-assembled in the cloud at lightspeed right down to resizing graphics to smaller sizes that fit the Kindle Fire screen.
Cool, eh? Yet those features (TCP Acceleration and Web Page Acceleration) were both present in my old Starband satellite Internet connection back in 2000, where they were necessary to make surfing even possible over a 44,600 mile round trip. The Starband equivalent of EC2 was (and still is) a Gilat data center in Virginia. I’m not sure the Amazon Silk team has actually invented anything at all.
So unless Amazon quietly bought Gilat, the owner of Starband, then they are going to have a hard time keeping other tablet companies from copying or licensing these clever browser features.
Amazon Silk is cool, but we’ll see its equivalent on an iPad, too, almost immediately.
Errr … what if Apple comes announces in October that they are coming out with an iPod Touch-X that costs $300. It would have the exact same spec as an iPod Touch except for a 7-inch screen and be able to run iPad apps. Consumers would have all of the experience of iPod/iPad and not be tied in to Amazon’s system.
Would this take the wind out of the Kindle Fire’s sail?
Let’s hope they do!
The only really important immediate question is, “Will the demand for the Kindle Fire outstrip the supply.” At $200, this is an easy buying decision for millions and millions of average Americans with limited disposable income, where a $500 buying decision is not and easy one to make.
Can they ship 20 million devices in the first 6 months? I think we will see the orders will be there … but only if takes less than 10 weeks after ordering for the product to be delivered to the customer.
But then again, this could be the next VW which, when it first came out, people who wanted one would wait months and months to get one.
There will likely not be a “seven-incher.” Apple isn’t going to scale iOS to anything other than a whole multiple of its current display resolutions, because the results of such things are visibly inferior and that would compromise the user experience.
Apple doesn’t believe that bigger is necessarily better, nor does it indulge in the practice of other hardware makers who fill shelves with barely-distinguishable variants of similar products.
On first glance, your point seems to make sense. Sure, bigger screens for the kids! Three for the price of one. But then you start to think about it.
What those kids will be using and wanting is apps. iOS apps, to be precise. Their friends at school will be telling them about the next cool thing; and they will want it desperately. Some friend of yours who is also a parent will be showing you the awesome new educational app his kids love…for iOS. Meanwhile your kids will have a great little web browser and video player with no apps. They will probably put it down and dig out their old iPods.
When I watch my daughter and her friends play with their iPods and iPads, all they use is dozens of apps. And it’s great! It takes them away from the passive watching of the Rapunzel over and over and over again and actually gets their minds working. My daughter is practicing writing Japanese characters and learning about numbers and basic math — she is almost 5. And these apps don’t break the bank either. The Japanese writing app was $.99 and occupies hours of her time.
Is a portable web browser — even with flash — a great thing for a 5, 7 and 9 year old? Not so much. There are some useful educational flash websites out there, but all in all it’s pretty shady stuff. Much of it full of advertising and spin to sell Disney products to those young minds. Also, check out how well a lot of kids flash apps run on 1024×600 displays with touch instead of mouse.
If you do follow through with this article and really buy the 3 Amazon tablets; I will make a prediction. Within a few months they will have begged or borrowed an iPad (yours maybe?). They will share it with no shortage of arguments. Soon there will be more than one iPad.
It’s great to imagine a world where developers flock to Amazon’s tablet or the fragmented Android marketplaces; but the reality is that Apple’s 3 year jump with their App store isn’t going to make competition easy. To make matters worse, the competition isn’t doing a very good job of drawing in developers with fragmentation and disposable products (lack of OS updates; buy the new model!). Apple has 500,000 apps and 10 billion downloads. That’s a lot of catch up.
I think the Amazon tablet is a nice upgrade to the Kindle concept. It will be a good reading device, and also a good media player and browser. It’s a great distribution channel for their content. But for them to make it an full “do everything” device like the iPad would take more development and R&D than Amazon will be willing to dedicate.
Ah, Robert…so many years I’ve been enjoying your crazy ramblings against Apple. I hope you keep trolling forever. Why must I feed you
Well as Bob might say, “What’s the killer app?”
The spread sheet for the PC, email for the internet…
What’s the killer app for an iPad or any pad for that matter. So far all I see is a toy.
“a toy.”
Yes, listen to what Bob said. He’s buying three of these toys for his children. Many other parents will follow suit. The Fire is a good form factor for children’s small hands too. And the price is right. The services will be purchased as gifts for birthdays, Christmas, reward for good grades, etc.
Unlike a bicycle, you’ll probably never trip over one of these in the driveway.
So yeah- Christmas gifts for kids, a toy
Yes, and like all toys, the kids will be disappointed at getting the inferior fire rather than the “cool” apple product. And for us grown ups, why would you want a limited device like a kindle? When the kindle app for apple came out, kindle became irrelevant.
And the Asus eee121 slate is the start of REAL tablet computing.
What’s the killer app for Tablets? The form factor. It’s like claiming that laptops are mere toys because they don’t have a particular app and thus won’t be big sellers.
I’m sick and tired being told that tablets are “toys” and for “consumption only”.
In business travel, I leave my laptop behind and just bring an iPad with a BlueTooth keyboard. A big bonus is that I don’t have to take out my iPad and display it for the TSA. Other bonuses include fitting on a airplane tray table and the light weight.
With my iPad, I can use Pages and Keynote and create the presentations I need. Sure, they’re not as full featured as Microsoft Office, but they work just fine. I can also use my email, Skype, IM, and I have my calendar and itinerary with me.
I can’t program on it unless I ssh from my iPad to a Unix system. Being a developer, this is rather limiting. But, I normally don’t need to program when I am visiting remote sites and working on proposals. I suspect that many other people find the iPad and other tablets as great travel companions.
If you’re that frustrated, you may already suspect that these are not very compelling reasons to buy a “third device,” and do not greatly differentiate the iPad from an eReader. As a developer, I’m positive you still have a laptop. Is creating basic presentations on the plane really worth $400? And by the way, you don’t have to take your laptop out for the TSA, either, if it’s in the proper kind of bag.
This is the fabled, long-coveted “color Kindle.” That’s enough, in my book, and a book is what it is. Additionally, you can write on the screen, for example to annotate PDFs: Amazon has been selling RepliGo, ezPDF, and several other readers on their App Store for months. Given that this is the only practical use I’ve found for an iPad so far, I might well decide to keep my $300 and buy a Fire.
AMAZON, itself (and all the electronic media they have) is the killer app for the Fire.
The surfing technology you mention is a central part of Opera Mini (see http://www.opera.com/mobile/), which is used by more than 100 million users, primarily in Asia, to minimize data traffic cost on their simple smartphones.
(OFFTOPIC) My wife and I both use Opera Mini every day on our Net10 LG 900G feature phones. Got them both on sale at Radio Shack for $29.95 each (1/2 price). I then immediately installed Opera Mini, Google Maps, Facebook Mobile,RSSReader and Gmail Mobile on the phones. We pay approx. $24 per phone per month incl. all fees,etc. by buying refill PINs from callingmart.com. When they are on sale at 7% off plus regular 1% discount plus callingmart credits (1%) and with no taxes I often pay less than 22.50 per phone per month. This gives us 750 minutes each per month for phone,text, and internet. Most months I have 100+ minutes left. If that’s not enough you can buy unlimited (they put 50k minutes on your phone for 30 days) for $50 a month. This phone does everything I need, I just can’t justify an Android or iPhone, if I could I would because I LOVE toys but this is too good to pass on. This phone is basically a high quality Blackberry styled clone. Mine is over a year old, hers 8 months. The batteries last about a week between charging and there are many java games available. NO, I have no connection with Tracfone/Net10, I just see the value in their service. This is a GSM phone but if you don’t like AT&T they offer many CDMA (Sprint/Verizon) phones. Either way Opera Mini is an incredible breakthrough for those of us who only use our phones to check email and browse a little. I can load and start reading Gmail on the Mini w/ an EDGE connection faster than my sister’s Droid can. If there was no Opera Mini I would buy a cheap prepaid Android because WAP browsers are useless!
How do you “lightly” run over something with a vehicle? How is it that the iPod is still functional? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Interesting article.
That was a compressed-air prototype.
Yeah, but…now your kids know what they are getting for Christmas!
This technique, however well implemented, probably won’t speed up web apps very much or any dynamic web pages for that matter, since they require building the page on the server then shipping it, /fait accompli/, to the browser.
So not only will the user have to wait for the page to be built, there may actually be an additional delay (however fast the connection) to ship the page to the browser.
So rather than seeing the page being built there will be some delay and *bing* the page appears all at once.
Referring back to the Opera Mini that is exactly how it works. Open Mini, click on one of the 9 Start Page links (like on regular Opera) there is a 1/2 second to 2 second delay, then the whole page appears at once. It’s not a big deal.
I hope you get a little compensation from Amazon for your advertising pitch, because you just sold one to me…
What about secure sessions (HTTPS). Will they be intercepting and prefetching those too? Will they see and store my passwords, my finances, my porn, my criminal activities? Can they be subpoenaed?
Steve Gibson has discussed those issues in this week’s podcast of Security Now! He says we’ll have to wait until he receives his (when it starts to ship) for the full story.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
What’s the business case? If Amazon sells 50M of these per year, then they have to make, in profit, an additional $2.5B per year to make up the $50 loss per device. Or, let’s say half that, $1.25B per year if the device has a 2 year life. This has to be in addition to what those customers would have spent anyway if they just used their laptop for shopping or their eReader for books.
Profit margin is currently 2.6%, revs = $40B. To get $1.25B in profit they need $48B in additional revs generated by the Fire. How is that possible? How can they afford to further develop this device? The stock price will take a huge hit.
I’m sure Amazon appreciates your cluing them in on their loss. Guess they expect to make it up in volume.
Besides it is a tax deductible expense that makes more business sense than a charitable donation.
$10 loss per tablet. Easily made up in subscriptions. See slashdot.
Amazon Prime membership @ $80.year
Kindle book purchases
Audio and video sales
I think that the average consumer will easily spend more than $40 a year on Amazon razor blades to put on the Amazon razor. It’s the Atari sales model all over again.
Just randomly Bob … I miss the podcast version of these! I hope you resume them soon
The real benefit for Amazon with Silk is that they will be able tie every single web request to your Amazon ID. The account profiling and product targeting they can do with that has to be worth $50 per affluent tablet-buying customer.
Absolutely! So they know what you read (tied to you individually), what products you look at on Amazon, what kind of reviews you make, what you look at on the web, where you live, and what you search for on Google. They would be in a position to block messages like chartbeat and doubleclick, which would speed things up for the user, so they would have a lot of leverage with these companies. Surely they can think of a way to make money out of this.
[...] costs just $199, and given that it has many of the iPad’s capabilities, some bloggers such as Robert X. Cringely have suggested that it could become the iPad’s first legitimate rival. It’s even less [...]
[...] safe to say that most people use Google to search for stuff on the Web. So when you open up that “fancy” browser on the Kindle Fire and you search for something, it’s likely that you’ll use Google. [...]
Factoring into the cost-benefit exchange, I read on Register Hardware that Amazon doesn’t care if it’s rooted, and may not even bootlock it. That ought to sell a few additional units; the Nook already has a healthy little community going. I wouldn’t be caught dead taking a photo with a tablet in public, as it is!
I am also really interested to see what happens with the Kindle Fire, I thought it was a reallly cool idea and even better with the addition on some android apps. But like you said we really won’t know until we can touch it.
[...] Kindle Fire: Take three tablets and call me in the morning Right now my boys, ages 5, 7 and 9 all have iPod Touches that have served them well despite having been many times lost, spilled on, and in one case very lightly driven over by a car. But the Touches, which also cost $199 as I recall, are getting old, their batteries recharged so many times to where they now barely last an hour. It’s time for something new, which in the eyes of my boys means something better. [...]
“What I’m not sure I see coming from this, frankly, is any boost for Android, which is hiding somewhere inside the Kindle Fire, potentially generating royalties only for Microsoft.”
Did Amazon buckle under and sign a “royalty” agreement with Microsoft? I hadn’t heard that piece of news.
Yes, it is true that some other, smaller, and weaker handset companies are “paying protection” to Microlimp. As far as I know, Amazon hadn’t and probably wouldn’t, being able to afford their own giant team of high-priced attorneys to defend the specious claims of patent violation which M$ is claiming against certain smaller companies.
BTW, isn’t it called the FIRE because one will be so tightly linked to Amazon that with 1-Click ordering this thing will “burn a hole in your pocket”.
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