Kindles NEW FIRE

The New Kindle fire...

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, presenting the Kindle fire

At a New York press conference on Wednesday, the Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, revealed that the much anticipated device would be under half the price of its market-leading rival, Apple's iPad, at $199. A vital, shock announcement was that the new Kindle Fire will only be going on sale in the US for now.

The wireless media player/book reader/web browser/geegaw will be the cheapest of its kind when it is released in the US next month. Others have tried and failed to crack the tablet market now dominated by Apple's Ipad.The iPad is designed to be an ultimate system for entertainment and multimedia, and is supported by Apple’s iTunes Store and App Store, which have over 18 million songs and 425,000+ apps, respectively. Some memory and graphic intensive applications, such as “Asphalt 6,” “Sim City,” “Dead Space,” and “Prince of Persia,” require the iPad to contain superior processor and memory to handle the graphic intensive nature of the applications. The iPad also features a long battery life, at least 16 GB of internal storage, and webcam for HD video conferencing to provide users with a comprehensive entertainment and multimedia experience. In addition, iPad’s 3G connectivity is essential to thousands of apps, such as the “Restaurant Story” and “Vegas Tower HD,” that rely on wireless connections to function.

Unlike the iPad that is designed to outperform the competing tablets in both technology and user experience, the Kindle Fire is designed to bring the fragment pieces of Amazon’s ecosystem, such as Cloud Drive, Music Cloud, Video Streaming, and App Store, all together under one roof so that the users can experience all the products and services while enjoying the core value proposition of reading and storing books and magazines.The tech specs on the Kindle Fire are designed for simple multimedia and entertainment, and its 8GB internal storage is not meant to store graphic and memory intensive applications that can easily take up internal storage space.

But Amazon is uncannily good at guessing what its customers "need" – its systems have squeezed every little clue about our future desires from all the information it has built up about us from our previous purchases. Estimates vary, but Amazon is set to sell between 2m and 5m Kindle Fires by the end of the year.

 Apple and Amazon come at the tablet market from opposite directions. Amazon cares more about selling media than devices, hence the cut-price tablet. Apple cares about selling devices – beautiful, exciting, all-singing, all-dancing devices that command all-singing, all-dancing prices. But despite the fundamental differences in their approaches, they clearly agree that the tablet is going to be the place where people consume media. Let's face it, we are all too lazy to open laptops these days!

Amazon needs people to buy a lot of content and it's going to be cutting deals to get exclusive stuff. It will be competing with Apple, Netflix and a host of others to get those exclusives. Deals are going to get done. Now there is more competition, maybe some will be good deals.

Of course, the Fire could fizzle out. And the media are all too prone to throw away online opportunities. But maybe, just maybe, it won't only be Bezos who has the last laugh.

What Do You think??