Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Apple loves to tout sales numbers for the app store but this jibes with my own experience. It's nice to have a healthy stock of third-party apps to choose from but if your core email, web, & fb/twitter apps are solid you're 90% there for most users and can start chopping secondary features and specs to undercut the iPad.
My main reading use case is in bed at night. I have a little booklight for reading actual paper books, but I think I'm waiting for an AMOLED 8" tablet for e-book reading. It works pretty darn well for my phone in low light conditions. (In fact the main competition for an 8" tablet would be one of those giant 5" phones with AMOLED).
People seem to get a bit religious about pentile. It doesn't make any sense to dismiss (or accept) it without considering all the other parameters. It's designed to make it easier and cheaper to hit certain resolutions and densities. If I could get more pixels or density for the same money then I'd happily take pentile. If there's not much extra gain over not using it, or not much extra cost, then I'd happily leave it out. It also, for whatever technical reason, seems mostly to be associated with OLED technologies, though OLED does not necessarily imply pentile. I think Samsung brands their non-pentile AMOLEDs as SAMOLED plus and they have them either on the market or due very soon in both big phone, massive phone and mid-size tablet varieties.
However, OLED does have the one advantage I mentioned about reading in the dark which decides this for me. For that reason alone I personally am waiting for a sufficiently high-density AMOLED tablet for reading purposes. Pentile will be just one factor in weighing up my options, certainly not a deal breaker.
For those unaware, the pricing v. price-drop dates graph has the Kindle on a straight-line path to $0 by November 2011. Word is when Amazon CEO was asked about that, he responded "ah, someone noticed" and changed the subject. How, when & whether this will happen is interesting.
I don't know about others, but my consumption of digital music from Amazon increased by about $20 a month within just a few weeks of them adding their Amazon Cloud Drive Player and their one-click purchase that dumps the album directly and instantaneously into the Cloud Drive.
With an Amazon tablet, I can see something similar happening for digital video.
This.
The chunk they want would seriously eat into Amazon's margins.
Because then then that's an experience that's either customer-integrated or concessionary.
A customer-integrated experience means bringing your own food to the stadium, maybe from the place across the street. That's what MP3 players were like before the iTunes Music Store. Dedicated experts love customer-integrated experiences, but they're the only ones.
A concessionary experience means renting the stadium's food stand to the highest bidder. The highest bidders are either cheapskates or have deeper business motives. The best case is that they just want to expose consumers to some other brand. But when the parties have overlapping interests, things get messy and unstable (i.e. Google on Yahoo, otherwise a great win for users).
These types of experiences both have an annoying tendency to suck out loud.
Apple's mastery in creating great integrated experiences is one of Steve Jobs' greatest legacies. It's something great creators strive to do and customers are happy to pay for.
If Apple were to move away from providing a well-integrated experience, they'd be moving away from not only their key strength but their key value to their users.
Many people keep holding up the videogame console model as a way to beat the iPad - sell the hardware at a loss, profit from software and licencing - but it doesn't work in the era of $1/freemium megahits and ad-supported web apps. Trying to make money off of movies/music/books is even more difficult. Piracy will always be easy and the competition among middlemen (Rdio, Spotify, Google, Apple, Netflix, the content companies themselves) is even more cut-throat than the software platform business.
I guess this is why Friendster have crushed MySpace and Facebook in turn.
Up to now, these devices have mostly been way too expensive - close to iPad prices - or cheapo devices (apad/hipad) with serious shortcomings, e.g. No Android market and ancient versions of the OS. In my case, I paid £160 for a device with poor quality control, had to return it as the wifi was broken. I changed my Google password a while ago, which broke Market and GMail and means I have to hard-reset in order to install any new apps. (There was no error message from those programs and had to trawl through forums to work out why there exiting immediately.) So tne 7" devices today have not exactly provided the out-of-the-box iPad experience.
"it's all about the software" as many hardware people say these days. If Amazon can build a smooth user interface, it will be the first inexpensive mini-tablet which "just works".
I get that 7" works for reading literature and has better portability. That is Amazon's home market.
The problem is that 7" makes full document reading (pdf, web pages, code, etc) hard.
I'd pay for an 12" iPad, since my eyes are older than 40. (-: Maybe I need a fresnel lens, Brazil style? :-)
The only thing I would like to see from Amazon is a larger display version that is suitable for technical books.
Of course, the RIAA and MPAA of the world's will be fighting tooth and nail over regional restrictions, I have a feeling Amazon made it easy to bypass regional restrictions because book publishers are technologically challenged and didn't quite realize what happened.
Of course, there is always the piratebay for countries which aren't in the G7...
At this point, their brand is so strong, you'd need something huge...I can't even think of anything besides serious failure rates on iPhones or iPads.
There's a billion precedents. GM, 3dfx, pre-tick-tock Intel, George Lucas.
Like Google, the iPad is currently the low-end and the high-end of the market, but unlike Google, it's vulnerable on the low-end. That's where Amazon will attack it and with ~100 million customers, their credit card numbers ready to go, good brand-loyalty, a huge content store, and so much experience in on-line/cloud services that even Apple uses them, they'll likely have quite a bit of success.
I don't know the latest figures, but iPhones relatively small market share accounted for over 50% of profits last time I saw. Amazon might sell a lot of cheap tablets, but that won't hurt Apple's profits.
If you do that then it's something like 4% of unit sales share giving 50% of profit. If you exclude people selling millions of throwaway cellphones for pennies and only include HTC, RIM and the smartphone parts of Nokia, Samsung etc. then the profit they make (while still better than the industry average, thanks to RIM and Nokia pulling it down) is much more closely tied to market share and therefore seems much more under threat as Android advances on that front.
Apple created the tablet market, and consumers know it. The iPhone had a big impact on the smartphone market, but it didn't create it.
Apple earned itself 6-12 months of 100% ownership of the tablet market. People don't yet understand that there are any tablets apart from the iPad. Or, if they do, there will be a belief that the Android tablets are crap because they know that they're just following the success of the iPad.
I think it will take another two or three years before we start seeing tablets become a commodity, as the market begins to recognise the other tablets out there. Or, if this Amazon tablet is a success, then they might be a commodity by next Christmas :)
I have no doubt that at some point they'll slow down..but like I said in my OP, I'm not ready to bet against them yet.
Except that Android devices never went anywhere as media players. Nothing did, compared to the iPod. Even well after they were seen as a commodity and certainly not for lack of awareness of non-iPod competitors.
And the iPad is loved/used as much more of a big media player than a big phone.
So while Android devices certainly may overtake the iPad, the iPod market presents a great argument that they very well might not. At least not until an OEM puts some serious thought and consideration into the media experience.
I can attest that HN and Reddit Programming readership use iDevices at twice the rate they use Android devices, based on a sample size of 30,000 this weekend.
This didn't surprise me in the least. The people I know who use Android are either the people who can't afford iPhones (and kick up a huge fuss about paying for any content) or people who love tinkering with them.
Imagine this. One prime account that would give you netflix like access to all the music, books and movies from amazon's library. Music and Video is pretty much at par with the rest of the iTunes competitors already and once Amazon gathers enough momentum, the book publishers will bow and then Amazon Prime will hold so much value, it wouldn't be sensible to not have one.
Amazon might throw a lot of money at it, but my money is on Samsung & Apple battling it out. I think Amazon is doing this because Apple shut them out from their App store.
(a) actually obtain the rights to WebOS (whereas Android they can just fork a version from git),
(b) retool all their existing app infrastructure to support WebOS, and
(c) promoting WebOS to developers when probably the only WebOS device that would be available to them would be the new Kindle and the fire-saled Touchpads,
I don't really see them moving to WebOS, or away from Android in general, anytime soon.
No, they also have to negotiate patent licenses or find some other way to avoid injunctions. (Sadly.)
Is this really true ? I know I'm a bit provincial but I don't know anyone with an iPad and have only ever seen anyone with one TV. I'm not even sure my friend who works in the Apple store has one at home (he's never mentioned it and he's the kind who would).
EDIT I got my reply from asking him. It's revolutionised how entertainment and other media are consumed in his house.
me: how do you like it ?
he: Very much. Lou uses it all the time ... She hasn't used a pc since.
That said, it's going to be half (or even less) the price and have seamless access to a very wide array of content. I don't think they're worried about the Xoom, or the discontinued TouchPad and or the new Galaxy Tab that's illegal to sell in most major markets... They're clearly leveling up against the iPad.