Amazon's Kindle Fire: does it have something to offer other than cheapness?

The latest company to jump on the tablet bandwagon-- in as much as such a bandwagon actually exists-- is Amazon with the launch of its new Android-based Kindle Fire.

Clearly, the distinguishing feature of buying Amazon's offering is that the device is coupled with Amazon's purchasing ecosystem, as opposed to, say, Apple's if you were to buy an iPad.

One thing that strikes me is that at present at least, the majority of media focus appears to be on the price, which at $199 does seem aggressive to the point of being a loss leader. When Apple originally launched the iPad, arguably the spark of the recent tablet frenzy among the rest of the market, it is interesting to compare Apple's approach of offering what they saw as a "fairly priced"-- but by no means "cheap" if you sounded opinion at the time-- marketed essentially on features. Amazon clearly have their ecosystem on their side compared to the average Miscellaneous Android Tablet Manufacturer X. But they do appear to be buying into the price-focussed strategy of the other manufacturers. It will be interesting to see how this plays out!

What do you think? I'd love to hear your opinion about the Kindle Fire.

Some thoughts in response to Matthew Baxter-Reynolds

Matthew Baxter-Reynolds wrote an interesting piece for the Guardian yesterday giving some points of view essentially on what Windows 8 will mean for businesses and IT careers. In particular, he makes the point that writing for a Windows 8 device means a more natural progression from the "C# in Visual Studio" type development that is the bread and butter of most business applications. And he makes the point that this time around, Microsoft will be fostering a tighter coupling of software and hardware platforms to move closer to the model of the iPad, part of whose success relies on it being more of a "self-contained ecosystem".

From this point of view, I think Matthew is probably correct: if the thing you want to concentrate on is writing boring old "bread-and-butter" business applications, then a platform that builds on the existing "bread-and-butter" platform of C# in Visual Studio will be a more attractive proposition for businesses to get a footing on the tablet bandwagon. And even it if wasn't more attractive from a development perspective, "Microsoft Windows tablet" may just sound a bit more 'serious and businessy' on a tender bid.

But, I think Matthew could have included a few other important observations (which don't necessarily contradict his point of view and if anything support it-- but which are nonetheless worth mentioning):

• the iOS "ecosystem" may still present an attractive market to developers in the sense that Apple have done the job of (a) isolating the 100+ million people with sufficient income to splash out on fancy toy; (b) sold them that toy on the basis of it providing enjoyment: or in other words, persuaded them that it is to their benefit to spend money on this new gadget (and associated apps); and (c) built a system for developers to market fairly effortlessly to that income-to-spare-for-toys-and-apps sector;
• games (and, apparently, knocking out games that you can sell for a buck or two a download) remain the predominant iOS market; the iOS development framework allows you to write virtually all of your application in a bog-standard C/OpenGL paradigm which will allow the creation/porting of a huge number of games with a minimal learning curve;
• while slightly quirky, in a sense Objective-C is just "another C syntax-based language" and if you stick around in programming long enough, you generally end up learning a new C syntax-based language every 10 years or so; indeed, "Java" as it looks today, and certainly how it will look if currently discussed language features make it into Java 8, is almost a whole new language compared to how Java was when it first materialised back in 1735 (anyone remember when Java didn't have inner classes, let alone generics or closures?);
• given that many business applications can and indeed ought to be written as web apps (a point which Matthew himself makes), for as long as HTML5/Javascript remains a standard enough development paradigm, I wonder if the Microsoft tablet will "C# in Visual Studio" actually become the paradigm of choice for tablet business applications anyway?

So, while I think Matthew is probably right that we could end up with an 80:20 split in one market versus a 20:80 split in the other, I don't know that that means that the "not-the-boring-bread-and-butter-database-application" market isn't viable.

Windows 8 soon to be upon us

It hardly seems 5 minutes since Windows 7 was the Next Big Thing. But apparently Windows 8 will soon be upon us, the principal motivation apparently to allow Microsoft to have another crack at jumping on the tablet bandwagon. It will be interesting to see how many people are actually burning to have Windows on their tablet, in whatever touchy-tabletified guise.

I'm quite happy not to have the following features on my iPad, for example:

• the need to grind the entire system down to the speed of a ZX Spectrum thanks to the latest antivirus software
• irritating pop-ups every five seconds requesting permission for applications to do their basic job
• having to battle with system that insists on saving documents in fundamentally stupid locations buried somewhere 5 million levels deep in the filing system
• the need for every Application That Goes Ping to take up 7 squillion terabytes of disk space, delay startup by half a minute and require at least 2 resets before they will work

But of course, I am open minded and eagerly await the first demonstration of the wondrous crop of Windows 8 tablets which will not fail to ensue.