It was the press conference heard round the tech/publishing world last Wednesday when Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Touch, a dedicated touch screen ereader, and Kindle Fire, the long awaited Amazon tablet. These new products, combined with surprisingly low price points, are enough to be a real game changer, causing Barnes & Noble’s stock to drop almost 10% after the announcement and preselling 95,000 units on its first day (the actual products will not be available until mid-November). While the Kindle Fire will not feature the microphone and camera capabilities of the iPad or the expandable memory of the Nook Color, it still stands as the deal to beat for the price.
The announcement of the new devices has sparked headlines with every “Fire” pun under the sun, which has also brought speculation about who exactly this news affects. Will the new Kindles put the Nook and Kobo out of business? Will it take a toll on iPad/android tablet sales? Will all the Kindles prosper, or does a cheaper tablet render ereaders obsolete? While everyone seems in agreement that the new Kindles are great for the consumer, who stands to lose their footholds in the marketplace? Here are some quotes so you can draw your own conclusion:
“Retailers hope the Kindle Fire’s low price tag — which is less than half that of Apple’s cheapest iPad tablet — will attract shoppers to stores during the busy holiday season. But the device, which offers free shipping and other incentives for customers to shop at Amazon, ultimately could drive sales to their online nemesis… That’s the dilemma retailers now face. Tablets are almost sure to be a big hit this holiday season for the likes of Wal-Mart and Best Buy. But at a time when more consumers are eschewing big-box stores to shop online, tablets are making it easier for them to do so. In fact, a Forrester Research study found that more shoppers who browse on tablets tend to buy — and place bigger orders — than they do when using personal computers or smartphones.”
—Mae Anderson, Associated Press (10/3/2011)
“The short answer is: hold out for the Kindle Touch if you can afford that extra $20. That doesn’t mean the non-touch Kindle isn’t good–it’s a perfectly decent e-reader that’s slimmer and lighter than the 2010 Kindle (which has now been redubbed “Kindle Keyboard”), and it’s the only current Kindle with hard buttons for turning pages (if that’s your preference). If you don’t need to use the virtual keyboard too much and you’re just looking for a no-frills e-book reader, it’s hard to argue with the $79 price tag.”
—David Carnoy, CNET, 09/29/2011
“Yes, I know that there’s a lot of talk out there about how the Kindle Fire is an iPad killer or that it will at least drastically cut into the sales of the iPad. Such speculation is basically hooey. So you can laugh dismissively when you read articles. After all you know better. The Kindle Fire and iPad 2 are two different tablets designed for two different markets and will have little impact on each other.
But the world of 7-inch tablets is a different story. The Kindle Fire is built on a 7-inch platform that’s relatively free of most of the typical high-end tablet features. It only has 8GB of memory, there’s no Bluetooth, no camera, no 3G, but also no high price…If Samsung can release the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus at street prices in the $250 to $350 range, they’ll probably sell like iced watermelon in August…”
—Wayne Rash, eWeek.com (10/1/2011)
“Amazon’s long-awaited tablet is finally here, in the form of the Kindle Fire. The $199 tablet runs a heavily modified version of Android, hooks neatly into Amazon’s gigantic book store, and is designed for multimedia consumption and, more than anything, reading.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Barnes & Noble Nook, released months ago, is designed for essentially the same thing. The Nook Color is the clearest competitor to the Kindle Fire, but given the hype surrounding the new tablet, it seems more likely that the holiday season’s biggest question will be “should I get a Kindle Fire or aniPad?”
Of course, the rumor mill is churning with talk that a new Nook Color is in store, so Barnes & Noble could be poised to leapfrog the Kindle Fire as it did to the Kindle with its Nook Touch Reader.”
—David Pierce, PC Magazine (9/28/2011)
“In July I stated that the new Nook was the best dedicated ebook reader and then a couple weeks later wrote that the Kobo eReader Touch beat it out and have been using the Kobo eReader Touch every day since then. With today’s new Kindle and Kindle Touch I believe that Amazon may have taken the dedicated ebook crown back from both Barnes & Noble and Kobo yet again.”
—Matthew Miller, ZDNET (9/28/2011)
“With the launch of the new $199 Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, attention may turn to Kobo, which is currently testing its Vox “eReader Tablet”.
Kobo submitted the Vox to the FCC on Sept. 14, a Wi-Fi-enabled tablet that will apparently compete with the Kindle Fire. But how? The release of Kobo Pulse, an expansion of its social platform, implies that the company will focus itself as a socially-connected platform in order to compete with Amazon’s reach.”
—Mark Hachman, PC Magazine (9/28/2011)
