With the announcement of the HD versions, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made this much more explicit, with multiple mentions about the value of Amazon's "services" and how the Kindle Fire would act as portal for that content. The real money wasn't in the low-margin hardware but in the high-margin banana stand of Amazon's services and digital products: apps, music, movies, books, and all the rest. Its price point belied the value of the product, and Google was (and is) counting on its deep pockets and robust advertising-based business model to keep Android's foot in the tablet door while other hardware manufacturers attempt to re-group.īut Amazon's narrative for the Kindle Fire was never all that different from Google's. It was almost unfair to compare the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 at all, given that Google freely admitted it was selling the Nexus 7 at cost, if not at a loss. The Nexus 7 came out of the starting gate as a better iPad competitor than the Kindle Fire had any hope of being, and the race was over almost before it had even started.įrom left: iPad 2, Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 7, iPhone 4S. Google didn't just create a sleek, snappy, honest-to-goodness Jelly Bean tablet it also slapped it with the same starting $199 price tag as the chunkier, lackadaisical Kindle Fire. Once the gift-giving season had passed, though, what were people going to do-buy one for themselves? Many tablet and Android enthusiasts, perhaps foreseeing the coming of Google's own tablet, the Nexus 7, stayed away. The Kindle Fire struck us as the perfect tablet-y gift for a close relative who has been hemming and hawing about whether to get an iPad for two years straight-here's a Kindle Fire, dad, now stop e-mailing me every week about tablets. Amazon sold tons of Kindle Fires in December 2011, and it wasn't long before the device held the top spot on the Android hardware charts. Sure, the initial Kindle Fire was rough around the edges, but its shockingly low $199 price tag and integration with Amazon's services won over a few (million) consumers.
Amazon landed the first real volley in the 7-inch Android device market.
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