New Amazon Kindle Tablet: A Threat to the iPad?

It seems that a lot of people are expecting the upcoming Amazon Kindle Tablet to become a serious contender to the Apple iPad, especially for the upcoming holiday season. Why? Mainly because of Amazon‘s established billing and customer relationship with tens of millions of customers and, secondly, price. The Android-driven Kindle Tablet is expected to start at only around $250, compared to the iPad starting at $499 – a 50% lower price.

Amazon already stores credit card information of more customers than probably any other retailer in the U.S., and by leveraging its strong sales channels, will make the Kindle Tablet a very attractive alternative for people considering buying a tablet. It was recently confirmed the Amazon Kindle Tablet will be released in November, right around the start of holiday shopping.

Clearly, the low-price entry is the main attraction. Choosing between two similarly priced tablets, buyers will in most instances select the iPad. However, when you have a good-quality tablet at half the price of the iPad, things start to look differently. The Kindle ebook-reader is considered a high-quality device and the Kindle Tablet is supposed to capitalize on the already positive image of the earlier Kindle.

Multiple Integrations Add Convenience for Users

Also, Amazon already has an Android Appstore. Surely, Amazon will provide some clever and tight integration with the Kindle Tablet and provide various incentives for buyers to download apps from the Appstore. With its complete ecosystem, Amazon will leverage its range of products and services and billing mechanism to make the Kindle Tablet a powerful shopping device.

The Kindle Tablet will not be as powerful as the iPad. It will have a 7-inch touchscreen and will only support two finger multi-touch screen, compared to the iPad 10 fingers support. Apparently, the Kindle Tablet will have one single-core processor while the iPad boasts a 1GHz dual-core chip. Also, storage capacity will be sparse, probably only around 6GB. Amazon probably expects users to store data in the cloud and will provide a connection with the Amazon Cloud. It's already been noted with the iPad and other tablets, these devices have been predicted to be driving growth in both Software as a Service and cloud storage because a lack of internal storage pushes users to employ online backup and synchronization services.

Satisfying Mass Market Needs

Although the Kindle Tablet will be somewhat underpowered compared to the iPad, it will be sufficiently powerful for the majority of users that simply need a tablet for browsing, doing online shopping and casual gaming. Those who want to play and run hardware-intensive games and applications will still want the iPad, or another high-powered tablet, anyway. The Kindle Tablet is clearly targeting a particular market segment – users seeking a simple, inexpensive device that still can fulfill the majority of requirements. And when you add simplicity, tight integration with Amazon cloud-based content and services, Appstore integration and access to Amazon cloud-storage, the Kindle Tablet starts to look very lucrative indeed.

Clearly, the early adopters have chosen the iPad so far, but soon we can expect the next wave of mass purchases to start, perhaps this Christmas. It's possible that the new Amazon Kindle Tablet will provide all the right ingredients to become the tablet of choice for the masses.