Yesterday, Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon.com, showed the world the new Kindle. Usually, I wouldn’t be too excited over yet another pad-release, and certainly not one built on the Android OS, but when Bezos does something, it is usually quite good.
He didn’t disappoint this time either.
The new Kindle – Kindle Fire as it is named – gives hope to a real challenger to the Apple iPad. Not that I’m not a fan of the iPad, on the contrary, but it’s never bad with some competition for these things to not stagnate, and so far there’s been none out there to even come close to the iPad. Kindle Fire comes equipped with a very sleek look, not as wide as its competitors but as high, giving it more of a “you read this top down”-look than anything else out there today (600 x 1024px). I’m a fan of that. I’m one of those who have been questioning the 16:9 format ever since it became apparent that TVs were doomed to take that path.
So, what’s in Kindle Fire that will make it a hit? The form factor, the “built for purpose” design, and the price. Jeff Bezos understands the two most important things for buyers:
1) It should look good – preferably make ME a cooler person
2) It should be affordable
Apple have only one of the two above in their instruction manual for how to do business. Amazon have both.
What news do the Kindle Fire bring to the table then? Well, quite much. It supports a myriad of formats for movies and music, it has a completely new browser that leverages Amazon’s infrastructure (the EC2 cloud) to make surfing the web even faster, and it also leverages the cloud for storage of movies, music, and books – as long as they were purchased from Amazon, that is.
From an industry/enterprise perspective, this is actually the best kind of news we could all get. With someone like Bezos, that understands design and pricing, it will most likely push the Android market, possibly all of the handheld market, into lower price territories and thereby help increasing the adoption rate giving us all the opportunity to do business even more efficiently and – not least important – looking good while doing so.
I have not yet seen any Android based product out there that have been really good. Sure, there are phones and tablets available that run Android but none of them so far have even come close to a “Wow” from anyone I know. I have yet to try the Kindle Fire but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s a potential “Wow”, and that’s saying something.