Do we finally have a real competitor to the iPad? Is Amazon going to do it!?!? I’m getting pretty excited here.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPad (actually it’s my company’s, but hey). However, the world needs at least one legitimate competitor to the iPad to keep Apple honest and to push the industry to continue to innovate.
Preliminary sales numbers for Amazon’s Fire are supposedly very impressive. Mashable is reporting:
More than 250,000 Kindle Fires have been pre-ordered since Amazon announced the new tablet computer last Wednesday, according to a report from Cult of Android.
The blog says a “verified source” within Amazon provided screenshots of the company’s internal inventory system. The screenshots show the Kindle Fire has been pre-ordered at an average rate of 50,000 units per day.
That’s legit if it’s true! Note that I couldn’t link to the original source, Cult of Android, because their blog seems to be down. This is big news… Ah, wait, it’s working for me now:
These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon’s Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day… Those numbers make the Kindle Fire’s launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales. The original iPad sold 300,000 units on April 3, 2010, its first day of availability. In the first month, iPad sales amounted to over a million units. By the time the iPad 2 came around in March of this year, Apple managed to rack up an estimated 2.5 million units in first month of sales.
What does this mean, beyond the fact that there may be another real player in the tablet space? I think that it shows that PRICE really matters in the tablet space. $199 is a sweet spot, perhaps. And remember that HP’s tablet flew off the shelves when the price was really reduced… it looks like there is a market for lower priced tablets. Of course, this follows along with the Google Android strategy of having a LOT of low end phones running on the software.
What will it mean for app developers? 1) Get in the Amazon Android marketplace. 2) Get ready for another form factor + potentially highly modified Android OS. 3) Get your hands on one of these devices ASAP so you can get a feel for how your applications will run on it.