By Sriram V IyerAmazon’s Kindle was an awesome way to read books – So much that people who really wanted to read books preferred it over the glossy iPad’s iBooks.
But, iPad, needless to say, is much much more than an eBook reader. It does almost everything that a regular user of computer might want to do at a very convenient size. It has a brilliant display, amazing screen resolution and pixel density, and looks gorgeous. Camera, Facetime, Games, Apps, and the list goes on.
Samsung, RIM, Motorola tried their best to dethrone iPad as the tablet of choice, but their attempt was not enough.
Now, comes the Kindle Fire. Or does it? :)
Kindle is a tablet device that is powered by Google Android (Surprising, they use the phone version (2.3) instead of the tablet version (Honeycomb)) – And, going by reviews, it seems to be even better than what Google could do with Honeycomb! And, that’s saying a lot!
Kindle Fire is a ‘Content Consumption Device’ if I can call it so. (If someone else called it so, I didn’t know :)) – It is the gateway to all the content you can consume that Amazon can give you:
- Books (duh) and Magazines
- Music
- Videos
- WhisperSync
- Integrated Cloud Storage and COMPUTING!
If you didn’t jump out of the chair reading the last point, you must really be sleepy :)
Amazon has done some pioneering work for their browser, with a feel-good name, ‘Silk’. Silk is not your regular next-door browser. It is a tightly coupled rendering engine, whose power lies in the Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute) powering it from the cloud. Simply put, you get Amazon Cloud’s IMMENSE computing power behind your browser, and you are not limited by the CPU of the device. (which is a Dual Core, 1GHz processor – Whoa!)The founders of Sun must be very happy to see that their initial vision of ‘Network is the Computer’ is finally coming true. Amazon cloud player indeed was a hint to what lay ahead.
Amazon has not produced an iPad competitor in terms of device – But, they’ve worked on the whole experience of consuming content in a convenient form factor, which is the whole idea of a tablet.I hope Apple has spent enough time on their iOS 5 offering. For, they really need to pull their socks and deliver, at least in the next iteration! And, Kindle Fire comes at a cost of 199 USD, compared to iPad 2 that starts 499 USD! I am sure Amazon loses money with every Fire sold, but, they’d glad to compensate with the content they sell from their stores.
I am so excited with the prospect of how Kindle Fire is going to be a game changer, just the way iPad was. Kindle Fire is not the next Galaxy Pad or Xoom. This is a paradigm-shifting product.
Amazon, that was a BRILLIANT move! Your turn, Apple!
Do follow Sriram’s column regularly at YourStory: Expert Talks