Kindle Fire Grabs Over Half of the U.S. Android Tablet Market 134
New submitter DillyTonto writes "Amazon got shelled by analysts and the press after releasing a buggy first iteration of the Fire edition of the Kindle e-reader. Three weeks later the Kindle Fire owned 14 percent of the whole market for tablets. Three months later, more than half of all Android tablets sold in the U.S. are seven-inch Kindle Fires, despite a huge bias among buyers for 10-inch tablets. How could a heavily modded e-reader beat full-size tablets by major PC vendors? It's cheaper than any other tablet or e-reader on the market, for one thing. Also important is its focus on being an e-reader, 'because people buy hardware to have access to one app or function, then take the other things it can do as an additional benefit.'"
Better Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that better marketing, and tie-in to the Amazon eBook store also played huge factors. Otherwise the Nook Color would have dominated long ago, as it has all the same benefits they tout about the Kindle Fire, but released much earlier and was a more polished product at the time of the Kindle Fire release.
Re:Better Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure if marketing or just cultural perceptions. While it isn't so much now, MP3 players were effectively generically iPods for a while. EReaders (I need to look up how to handle eReader words at the beginning of sentences. That just looks weird) are to many Kindle. For some a tablet is an iPad. Until the iPhone came out it wasn't a smartphone, but a Black Berry.
This was the first color Kindle that was a Kindle. As the summary stated, people are likely buying an eReader instead of a tablet. I know people who are afraid to even sit down at a computer because it is a scary computer (they still exist) who see the Kindle Fire as a fancier and neat book.
Re:Better Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Android market share on tablets is so small compared to iPad. This makes "android tablet market share" (wtf?) easy to capture to begin with. If people are too poor to get an iPad but want a tablet, they will get the cheapest they can. With Amazon's subsidization (their business model is to make money by selling ebooks, not devices), they are able to sell their device at the lowest price point.
Basically, news about nothing.
Re:Better Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. The market share so tiny that a tablet can grow from 14% of the total tablet market to 50% of the Android tablet market, which implies at least 28% of the tablet market belongs to Android (this from the fucking summary posted above). You technical experts are pretty fucking dumb.
Re:Better Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Fanboys aren't capable of performing cognitive tasks, such as arithmetic, when the love of their life is involved.
Re:Better Marketing (Score:5, Informative)
If people are too poor to get an iPad but want a tablet, they will get the cheapest they can. [...] Basically, news about nothing.
You know, that would be insightful or interesting or something if you weren't completely wrong. There were and are cheaper android tablets and yet the Fire is still the hero of the day.
Re: (Score:2)
It's from a brand that most people have heard of, and it also has an IPS screen. Can other tablets match that at the price point?
Re: (Score:2)
Latest Ainol Novo 7 Aurora android 4.0 tablet pc 7" IPS Capacitive screen Camera 1GB DDR3 8GB HDMI
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/525833992-Latest-Ainol-novo-7-Aurora-android-4-0-tablet-pc-7-IPS-Capacitive-screen-Camera-1GB-wholesalers.html [aliexpress.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Something made from leftover stuff scraped up off the factory floor from some company that nobody but them has heard of."
Care to take your head out of the sand?
Search: "Ainol Novo 7" About 44,000,000 results (0.47 seconds)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ainol+novo+7%22 [google.com]
Customer review:
Wow, no wonder it got the 2nd Place of the Best Tablet Reward on CES
Ainol is a new name to most US consumers, but they are well known in China. I am not very surprised to see they won the best tablet reward 2nd place on CES this year, but I am quite amazed when I finally got a hold of NOVO 7 Aurora.
It's so cool, so nice, just like an Apple product. Actually the shinning white case mimics the Apple style as well. If they print an Apple logo on the back, you will believe it's an Apple 7" iPad.
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't mean that a well known name is a good thing, just that something with a well known name will sell better.
Re: (Score:2)
He said, "Brand that most people have heard of," not, "Something made from leftover stuff scraped up off the factory floor from some company that nobody but them has heard of."
Yes, and that is called moving the goalposts, it's a logical fallacy that occurs when someone answers your question and then you reformulate the question based on their answer so that they cannot give you an answer that doesn't make them look like the asshole. But in fact, you (and he) are the asshole[s] (and you're an anonymous, cowardly asshole) because moving the goalposts is bullshit. The original assertion was responded to rather neatly, and I'm fucking done. I'm not going to play this game with you.
Re: (Score:2)
The Nook tablet fits that and is $50 less.
Re: (Score:2)
Kindle Fire is mostly here a device to watch YouTube (and some downloaded movies). I think in families with (young) children a Kindle Fire is used more for watching YouTube than reading eBooks (also, we have two Kindle Touch for just that). I like it for that, my wife and I both love cooking, and somehow sitting on a couch together and watching a cooking video on YouTube is way nicer than watching the same movie on a laptop or desktop computer. Also, when cooking, one can keep the Kindle Fire close at hand,
Re: (Score:2)
I use mynook color to read ebooks and surf the web. However my deeesiire fir a couple apps tatbarnes doesnt approve of means my next device will be a generic andriid tablet. 7" tablet is nice for travel.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I take it the virtuaaal keybod is a biit shiiiity//?
Re: (Score:2)
Unlikely in the near future, because outside the US, the Fire is merely a che
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Are you saying that the Kindle Fire has a Nook Books app? That changes my opinion of the device, and would make it viable as a replacement for my Nook.
Re: (Score:2)
iCaps are weird no matter how you do them... I treat the word as a proper noun, with a stupid lowercase letter that has no place in any grammatical history prepended.
Re: (Score:1)
I think you have to consider what software you want to run before you claim the Nook Color is the best deal. If you need Windows software or some package that is only available on the iPad, then the Nook would be a waste of money.
Re: (Score:2)
Why? Isn't the value of a platform dependent on the software that it can run? I'm not saying the hardware doesn't matter, but it only matters with respect to how the software makes use of the hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
What software can a Nook Color running Cyanagen mod not run that you need? I haven't run into anything it cannot do that I need.
What you just said is akin to saying that an iMac is junk because it can't natively run Windows apps. If you consider Fusion, what is the difference between that and RDP from a Nook Color?
No... (Score:2)
Re:No... (Score:4)
I'm still waiting for the one that can display an A4 page without scaling.
Re: (Score:2)
"I'm still waiting for the one that can display an A4 page without scaling."
I don't get it. If you don't print it out, why format it to a size that paper sellers invented last millennium?
Re: (Score:2)
Because it allows you to put what is traditionally a page of material on a - page - while not cranking the font size down to where you have to be 16 years old to read.
It also handles PDFs from printed pages well. And Lord knows, there are lots and lots of those.
So yes, it's an ancient and arbitrary size, but so are Imperial units and we seem to have a devil of a time getting rid of those stupid things.
(The rest of the world can at least ignore that last statement, but us USA!ers have to deal with it.)
Re: (Score:2)
So yes, it's an ancient and arbitrary size, but so are Imperial units and we seem to have a devil of a time getting rid of those stupid things.
And SI units are supposed to be what? A meter is 1/10000 of the portion of a meridian running from the north pole to the equator through Paris. Why not 1/15000 of a meridian running through Nantes? A second is a day divided by 86400. Where did that number come from? Sounds arbitrary to me. (The modern definitions of these units are just things that can be more consistently measured, but based on the same arbitrary values of the original units.)
Re: (Score:1)
They're both arbitrary; the point was that you can't get rid of arbitrary things easily, not that there is some non-arbitrary practical unit system. The size of a tablet is also potentially arbitrary, but it's convenient at times to fix them to other arbitrary units.
There are advantages to the SI system in terms of trivial, or at least more-trivial, unit conversions, but it's not used for reasons of tradition and backwards compatibility, mainly in the US, and in other countries to a lesser extent.
Re: (Score:2)
1/10000000, not 1/10000.
As to why not Nantes, well, the Committee for Public Safety wasn't operating out of Nantes....
Re: (Score:2)
But the metric system was part of the Thermidorian Reaction.
Re: (Score:2)
My apologies for using the "Committee for Public Safety" as a rude commentary about the French Revolution as a whole.
Nonetheless, Paris was the center of French government then (both before and after the Committee for Public Safety), and the metric system came about as an act of the French government during the Revolution.
If the Metric system had come out of the UK, it would have used London as its referent. If it had come out of Germany (if Germany had even been a nation then), they'd have used Berlin..
Re: (Score:2)
The Thermidorians stopped a murderous regime *dead* in it's tracks and gave us the metric system. "I'll give them that." I'd give them everything.
Re: (Score:1)
It is possible to read PDFs on a tablet, but either you have to scroll around or everything is small. If the tablet were the same size as the paper, then things would be easier to read.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because of the ubiquity of the PDF format which is more suited for printing than being reflowed on a screen. That's why.
Re: (Score:2)
Why specify "without scaling"? Just say "can display A4 such that it's easy to read." the new iPad has a ridiculous number of pixels and even scaled pages look great. Unless you really need a mm to be a mm, it doesn't make a difference. And if you do, your needs are likely too specialized for the market to prioritize.
Large print (Score:2)
Unless you really need a mm to be a mm, it doesn't make a difference. And if you do, your needs are likely too specialized for the market to prioritize.
People tend to lose visual acuity as they age, and a lot of people are halfway blind to begin with. If the needs of senior citizens and people with disabilities are "too specialized for the market", what should be done to accommodate such users?
They answered the right question, (Score:5, Insightful)
... and delivered at the right price (Score:5, Insightful)
They answered the right question, that being "why would you want to buy a tablet?".
And they delivered at the right price. It seemed that most other tablets were in the price neighborhood of the iPad, so people naturally just got an iPad because of the iPad's perception of having more features and apps. With the Kindle Fire coming in at such a relatively lower price they overcame this perception of the iPad.
I am an iPad dev [perpenso.com] and when I played with a Kindle Fire at a family Christmas dinner I thought it was a pretty cool device well worth the price, any performance differences or missing apps were more than offset by the price.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:... and delivered at the right price (Score:4, Insightful)
Curious to know how lacking was the perf., in your opinion?
It was just a subjective impression. The device was a recently unwrapped Christmas present still in a largely stock configuration. I only played with it for about fifteen minutes. My feeling at the time while navigating between the various built-in apps, giving each a quick try, and then navigating a couple of web pages was that it was not as snappy as an iPad 2, but I didn't really care. It was a $200 device not a $500 device and it was clearly "good enough". As an engineer I was impressed at what they managed with such an aggressive price point.
My cousin, the owner of the device, was quite familiar with the iPad 2, she often used her daughters, and had a similar impression. However she added that she loved the size, it looked far more convenient to carry around during the day to her.
Re: (Score:2)
Single-core Android devices tend to have laggy UI due to the way their rendering works. I believe that iOS offloads the rendering to the GPU (I know Windows Phone does, but of course it's not available in tablet form-factor) which is much better-suited to such things. Same idea as hardware-accelerated browsers on the PC, except that Apple (and Microsoft) can optimize the code for a few specific chips. Android doesn't have that option, not without re-writing a good chunk fo the OS for each new chipset (somet
Re: (Score:2)
Cheap and good enough beats state of the art... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why eventually the number of Android tablets will surpass the IPAD, even though Apple will still make
tons of money at the high end.
The secret of the Kindle Fire is that for now they have found the sweet spot of android tablets. A high enough price
not to be junk and a low enough price to compete against Ipad and the Fires secret sauce...the backing of amazon.com
who has the customer service and the money and wont cut and run which gives buyers confidence
Also Amazon.com unlike the other tablet sellers built up gradually from a successful inexpensive e-reader
instead of just trying to come up with a "Our version of the ipad"
.
iPad 2 eventually $300 ? (Score:3)
Of course I am curious as to why the original iPad was simply retired. Perhaps there were cost or performance issues in the long term.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course I am curious as to why the original iPad was simply retired. Perhaps there were cost or performance issues in the long term.
Apple wants to be able to tell you that anything as slow as the original iPad or slower is now obsolete to reduce the number of people who will buy them, thus increasing their potential customer base.
Re: (Score:2)
Not the processor speed, but the iPad 1 is crippled due to having only 256MB RAM. A lot of apps are very crashy, and some new apps aren't supported at all. (But at least the web browser is reasonably stable after the most recent update.) iPad 2 has 512MB and dual-core, but otherwise there's not a huge difference from the first one.
Re: (Score:2)
Keeping all three alive either leads to stagnating development (look at the specs on the iPad 1, especially the RAM, then look at how much memory is available to apps after the latest iOS update... yeah) or complaining customers who are upset that their "brand new" iPad 1 can't run anything in the store.
Even without other planned-obsolescence-related motives, retiring it was the right thing to do to keep the app ecosystem healthy. One of the reasons Apple mobile devices are so much nicer to develop for tha
Re: (Score:2)
I'm using my Xoom quite a lot: during the day next to my PC to check up on RSS feeds and click though if the news looks interesting, at night in bed to watch movies from my home server via UPnP/DLNA; plus my phone company authorizes tethering and I've got a $30, 3GB plan, though I use it a fair bit to brose the web while travelling. For reading, my Galaxy Note in more pleasant since I can use it one-handed and the AMOLED screen is much less tiring.
Re: (Score:3)
The point is, like a PC, Android tablets are going to compete mostly on price. Amazon gives u
This write-up is misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The Fire is not a 'heavily modded e-reader'. E-book readers are traditionally e-paper devices, the Fire is an Android tablet with e-reader functionality highlighted in the software. You can make a tablet an e-reader, but the other way around, not so much.
2. If more than half the Android tablets sold are 7 inch, then there is no bias among buyers for 10 inch tablets in that category. If you're talking about the entire tablet market, then of course it's 10 inch - the iPad still has more than half the tablet market *in units*.
All that said, the last part is spot on - it's being marketed as an e-reader with extra features (woo, color!), not as a tablet... even thought that's exactly what it is. A lot of people still don't know what they want from a tablet, but they know what they want from an e-reader. If it does more stuff, all the better. If they want a tablet... statistically speaking, they're already buying an iPad.
Price? (Score:2)
Hmm, maybe the price had a little more to do with it?
I'm waiting for the google tablet,
Screw Kindle Fire. (Score:2, Insightful)
If I'm going to limit myself to a 7" tablet I'm going to get the Nook. Same processor, twice the on-board storage, twice the RAM, has an SD slot, just as hackable and can run the Kindle app.
Cost the same.
Re: (Score:2)
3G support means nothing to me. I use WiFi or nothing. If I'm on the go and I need WiFi for my e-Reader and there's no hot-spots my phone provides one.
Really, I've got enough books stored up in advanced I could go a month of reading and not run out of books I've already downloaded.
Re: (Score:2)
I got a Nook Simple Touch used in new condition (AFAICT) and rooted it the day I got it. $75 with the charger, box, etc etc. And the e-ink display is surprisingly useful to me even though there is no color. I'm using Opera Mobile because B&N somehow managed to bone the stock browser and Opera Mini is poop and Firefox won't run on it at all. Most apps seem to work OK, except for the market search, so you use searchmarket. And Youtube, if you log in you can't use it. But you can't watch videos on the disp
Re: (Score:3)
You're going to wait how long?
That's dumb. We're talking about a few hundred dollars. You probably spent that much on a GPU in the last year or two.
I spent that much on lunch last month.
PDF is a problem. ePub is better.
Cut the euphemism (Score:4, Funny)
despite a huge bias among buyers for 10-inch tablets.
What he really meant was, despite a huge bias among buys for the APPLE IPAD
Re: (Score:1)
The iPad is not a 10-inch tablet. Its screen is smaller than 10 inches.
Re:Cut the euphemism (Score:4, Funny)
Apple means 10 internet inches.
Re: (Score:2)
What he really meant was, despite a huge bias among buys for the APPLE IPAD
Right, what he meant was, despite a huge bias for the APPLE IPAD (according to Apple) people are snapping up Android tablets like crazy.
Apples to other fruits the color of fire (Score:3, Insightful)
Not $430 lower. $300 lower. (The $629 iPad is the 4G model, the Wi-Fi only model is just $499)
$200 lower (Score:3)
Let's compare the devices that are actually somewhat comparable: 2nd gen iPad is $399.
Unknown sources (Score:1)
2nd gen iPad is $399
Plus $99 per year to enable installation of applications from unknown sources, if that's your thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Plus $99 per year to enable installation of applications from unknown sources, if that's your thing.
If that was your thing, you probably wouldn't have chose the iPad.
Re: (Score:2)
Read your own text, you want to install applications from unknown sources. FAIL
How many people buy an android device and do that?
Anybody who used Amazon Appstore before the Kindle Fire came out, for one thing.
Kindle Fire is not bad, but too small (Score:3)
Re:Kindle Fire is not bad, but too small (Score:5, Funny)
And apparently it comes with monospaced fonts, which is great for those of us who miss telegraphs and typewriters.
Re: (Score:1)
And apparently it comes with monospaced fonts, which is great for those of us who miss teletypes and typewriters.
Fixed that for you. Telegraph operators use handwriting. Teletype was what delivered a printed message with a mono-spaced font.
Conclusion ... (Score:2)
My conclusion here is that price is more important than specifications or features. At least in this case perhaps.
It was perfect for me. (Score:2)
my guess (Score:3)
low price because Amazon was selling at a loss or near loss, they want you to buy media for the Fire. They made an Android tablet that wasn't marketed as an Android tablet, but people hacked it into one, which is something that Amazon will block or the price will rise. Simply put, unmodded, it's average, modded, it's better than other Android tablets.
I received mine as a gift (Score:3)
I had purchased a Nook e-ink refurb a few months before I received the Fire as a gift. I tried the Fire for reading for a few months and it became obvious that it was much more tiring on the eyes versus the Nook.
The rest of the functionality of the Fire was lacking, as you don't have access to Google Play. It was relatively painless to root and flash, so I went to CM9 (ICS) on it. CM9 is missing hardware acceleration, so I flashed CM7 (Gingerbread). It's fairly functional as a normal tablet. There is quite a bit of developer support on xda-developers.
There's not much of an Android tablet market (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll rephrase. "Unless you're already an Android enthusiast OR you're a trolling jerk, there's no reason to specifically look at an Android tablet."
So just to be clear, you're making an Ad Hominem attack when I raise a reasonable objection? In other words, you are trolling when you accuse me of being a troll? You are a hypocrite and a liar and I hope you die of ass cancer.
Re: (Score:2)
Your mom says your Eggo is ready.
And to be fair, he already covered your exception - unless being an Android enthusiast doesn't accurately cover someone who specifically avoids Apple products?
Then you accused him of being a paid shill for Apple, and got faux-offended when he responded to your insult in kind, so much so that you dug deep for the most juvenile "offensive" comeback that you could muster?
Trolling: you're doing it wrong.
Re: (Score:3)
being an Android enthusiast doesn't accurately cover someone who specifically avoids Apple products?
You have it backwards. Someone who specifically avoids Apple products doesn't adequately cover being an Android enthusiast. I'm using Android not because it's Android, but because it's not Apple, and indeed, because it's based on Linux. That means that I can do stuff with the Linux on it, when I'm not satisfied with the Android.
On the other hand, I am becoming an Android enthusiast because I'm actively using it now and enjoying some of the advantages of the ecosystem. But that's a whole other issue. I've be
First, it is slightly cheaper; and second... (Score:5, Funny)
...it has the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Re: (Score:2)
...it has the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Come to think of it, this is exactly the device that Mr. Adams was imagining back in 1978.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, he was imagining the ChromeBook, if such a device were locked into Wikipedia as its only resource.
Slightly cheaper, very convenient, but whose content is largely apocryphal.
Love Mine (Score:1)
Especially after I got it for the $140 re-furb sale they had a few weeks ago, and threw Ice Cream Sandwich [xda-developers.com] on it. Wish it had a camera sometimes, but otherwise I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a cheap tablet.
Nook Tablet FTW (Score:2)
I love my NT, I got a color before the Fire was ever released.
Many of the Ebooks I have are PDFs from DriveThruRPG, so color was a requirement and the Fire wasn't even an option at the time.
Now the Fire seemed, and still does seem when comparing it to the NTs & Colors, like an "Oh shit, people want this? We have to slap something together and get it out for the holiday season."
TFS is full of bunk (Score:2)
Because its marketed as a color reader, priced as a color reader (well below typical tablet prices), from the leading reader vendor, and, oh yeah, the reader market was something like an order of magnitude bigger than the tablet market in number of units being sold, and growing faster than the tablet market, even before the Kindle Fire was released.
Except
Maybe they did it right (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have a Xoom and find nothing horrendously wrong with it. The price was right ($300 for tablet + 32GB + sleeve + multimedia charging dock w/ loudspeakers); it runs gReader, UPnP, Chrome, K9 Mail... perfectly well, and reads all SD videos with no issues which, given the size of the screen, is sufficient. HD videos don't work though.
I'm trying to find a reason to discard it and get a newer one, but can't really imagine what more I could be doing with a more recent tablet. Even on my 22" desktop, I'm watching
Re: (Score:2)
Right. I'm perfectly happy with my Xoom from the hardware point of view and look forward to Android sucking less over time. The only thing that will move me off this is a 12 inch tablet.
Re:How is this surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, Depends on where you choose to place your standards. Mine include standard ports, extensible/removable storage, and USB device/host mode. As you said, the Xoom is great at $299, especially with 64GB total, a dock, and a sleeve. An equivalent iPad would have set me back about 3x more, not including all proprietary cables and doodads, and extra Apps I've already purchased on Android.. I'm not sure what functionality you're thinking of.. it's sure harder and more expensive to connect an Ipad to/from stuff than a Xoom, with its standard ports, free UPnP/DLNA, cheap SDs, USB or Wifi keyboard and mouse and gamepad...
I'm really curious about what functionality you're thinking of, if you care to expand ?
Second, I don't really care about performance. I don't game in my tablet, mainly browse/read and watch video, so performance has been "good enough" for me for a while. I still have an original Nook Color, which I find OK too, though too small for at-home use.
Lastly, you overgeneralize: some Android phones have clearly superior features: my Note's AMOLED screen is both bigger, more contrasted, less tiring on the eyes, and more beautiful than the iPhone's unusable (to my old eyes), stamp-size, glow-in-the-dark LCD screen. Also, you seem to forget that Asus is also pushing keyboard docks that some people seem to love, and that quad-core is not only about performance, but also about battery life.
Re:How is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno if I agree. The Galaxy Tab ain't bad, really. I prefer my iPad, but I don't have any real serious complaints about the Tab. It even has a few things going for it, for example I can actually get emulators through the market. Can't do that with Apple, not without jailbreaking anyway.
I do think it's a problem of marketing. If you go to Best Buy, for example, you get a nice big display of what the iPad can do for you. When you go to the next aisle, there's something like 20 machines somewhat iPad'ish in shape all with varying price-tags, but none significantly lower than the iPad. I think the casual shopper would walk past that aisle and think "ah, a failed-to-be-cheaper-clone."