The Amazon Kindle Fire demos an electronic version of Wired Magazine. Photo: Victor J. Blue/Wired.comSteve
Jobs made it clear what he thought of 7-inch tablets in October 2010.
They're “too small,” and as good as “dead on arrival.” But the
announcement of and anticipation surrounding Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet
may soon have Jobs eating his words.
If you've been living under
a rock and haven't heard the news, Amazon debuted its $200 7-inch
tablet, the Kindle Fire, this week. Make no mistake: It's no iPad.
There's no front-facing or rear-facing camera, and it's only got 8 GB of
storage.
But it's not meant to be an iPad. It's a completely
different kind of tablet, designed for the pure consumer. That is, it's
designed for consumptive behavior: reading, listening to music, watching
video content. The lack of local storage isn't an issue, either; it's
meant to take advantage of the cloud with services like Amazon's $80
yearly Prime service, as well as Amazon Cloud Drive. And the smaller
form factor makes it extra portable, easy to whip out on the bus or the
subway (much like a Kindle).
“With a 7-inch device, you can
easily take your Kindle Fire with you and hold it in one hand for gaming
and movie watching,” Amazon representative Kinley Campbell said via
e-mail.
UX design consultant
Greg Nudelman
thinks that 7-inch tablets could become just as popular as larger 9.7
and 10.1-inch tablets, “but the types of applications and the context
and length of use between might be very different.”
The iPad,
although portable, is more difficult to manage with a single hand due to
its larger size. And while it is certainly geared towards consumptive
behavior, the iPad also strives to break the mobile-PC barrier by
becoming a tool for creation, with programs like iMovie for iPad and
GarageBand for iPad allowing users to produce content rather than just
passively take it in. Whether it actually accomplishes that or not is
subjective (some scoff at GarageBand's limited capabilities), but it's
possible, and likely that more apps of this nature are in the pipeline
(third-party produced or otherwise).
Amazon's decision to debut a
smaller-sized tablet was likely influenced by the players in the
current tablet market. The 7-inch space has the least resistance,
DisplaySearch's Richard Shim says. Its direct competition is more likely
to be the Barnes & Noble Nook Color, which also runs Android and
touts a similar form factor, than Apple's iPad.
That's exactly
what fueled Velocity, makers of the 7-inch Android-running Cruz tablet,
to choose that size. “We wanted to avoid the head-to-head comparisons to
the 10-inch iPad — ours is a very different product that goes after a
different target customer,” marketing manager Josh Covington said.
The
smaller size also allowed Amazon to more easily make a splash with a
lower price point, something other 7-inch tablet manufacturers are going
to have to mimic to stay competitive. Take HTC, which just dropped the price of its 7-inch Flyer tablet from an iPad-range $499 to a more affordable $299.
Samsung also jumped in on the hype, introducing its
Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus on Friday. If Samsung can manage a similar price, the Kindle Fire could have another legitimate competitor.
And
just in case it crosses your mind, a 7-inch tablet would not be
something Apple would likely ever debut. Apple has been tremendously
successful with its 9.7-inch iPad, which flew off shelves shortly after
its debut and has continued solid sales since. Unless that changes for
some reason, there isn't a need for Apple to break out a smaller iPad,
economically speaking.
It's also not in Apple's DNA. Since Steve
Jobs jumped back on board with Apple in the late '90s, Apple's success
has hinged on innovation, rather than riding on the heels of successful
consumer reaction in markets it doesn't have a presence in. Take the
netbook market for example: Rather than releasing a netbook, Apple
introduced the MacBook Air, and later of course, the iPad.
Part
of what's hindered the success of the
7-inch tablet, until now, is that
they are perceived to be more like an over-sized mobile phone than a
tablet, “and that appears to be the Achilles' Heel of the mini-tablets,”
Nudelman says.
But the genius of the Kindle Fire is that it's
more closely identified with Amazon's popular e-reader line than with
smartphones, so it has a clearly defined place within the user's mind.
And now that Amazon has made that distinction clear, other 7-inch tablet
makers can at least attempt to capitalize on that extra portable,
media-consumption angle, rather than marketing them against the iPad.
The
Kindle Fire's separation from both larger iPad-sized tablets and
large-screened smartphones, both in size and in function, will help
secure a solid niche for other 7-inch tablets to follow.
