Amazon Kindroid tablets: give away razors, sell blades?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 08 August 2011 18:06

Your IT - Home IT

Amazon's upcoming Android-powered Kindle tablets are coming soon, with industry reports, rumours, presumptions and prognostications suggesting the tablets will be sold at extremely competitive pricing, with app and digital media sales to bring in the real profits.

Amazon's supposed tablet plans sound a bit like the games console industry - sell the consoles below cost and make the bulk of profits from sales of games and associated online services.

It's supposed to be the way razor blade companies made their fortunes from disposable blade head attached to razor handles you kept on re-using'¦ until the next new multi-bladed heads come along with new connectors incompatible with the old handles, leading to yet another razor handle purchase and more blade heads.

With Amazon widely expected to be launching Android-powered Kindle tablets, or perhaps Kindroids as I've dubbed them, there has been a lot of talk about what sort of Android tablets they'll be.

The natural assumption is that 7-inch and 10-inch Kindroids are on the way, presumably with Honeycomb, an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor on the bigger model, and maybe something a bit slower on the 7-inch to keep costs down.

The China Economic News Service (CENS) says Amazon has engaged Quanta to manufacture its tablets, with production having started in July, and production being ramped up to '800,000 to 1 million units of its model per month from August through October'.

CENS' article also states that: 'Amazon's tablet PC features simpler technical specifications than competing models on the market and hence is cost efficient, reflecting the newcomer`s ambition to quickly gain a huge consumer base in the competitive landscape with budget-priced hardware and steadily carve out big profits with application software.'

PCMag.com's Tim Bajarin thinks along similar lines, stating that Amazon has a tablet with 'the best reading experience on the market', and one that can leverage everything that Amazon does and sells, from cloud storage and services, through to all forms of digital content, including sales and rentals, to everything else.

This well-oiled and proven infrastructure puts Amazon way ahead of other Android tablet makers and puts them in a much better position against Apple.

The story continues unfolding on page two, please e-read on!