Amazon Kindle Fire : Amazon’s Android Tablet all set to fire the tablet market

Amazon Kindle Fire – What a name to the most awaited tablet of the year. Amazon’s tablet is being waited on not for its hardware specifications but for the simple reason that it has a forked Android version and whole lot of content bundled with it. Amazon Kindle Fire will be launched on Wednesday (Sep 28) and the tablet will start shipping in the second week of November. Just in time for your Thanks Giving and Christmas.

A real iPad competitor?

Everybody is throwing in a ‘watch out iPad’ slogans whenever Amazon Kindled Fire is talked upon. Now that’s  good news. The only problem with it is, we had the same slogans with Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom. Those fortunately for iPad, turned out to be false alarms. Is Amazon Kindle Fire another false alarm?

Many tech pundits have weighed in on why Amazon tablet will be different. I don’t want to go there but I have a feeling that this time it will be different. Amazon already has a massive book collection, it has the cloud infrastructure and it has just added bunch of content partners including Fox movies for video content and Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith for magazines. What Amazon has done is, it has built the ecosystem and Kindle was its first conduit to transmit the content. With Kindle Fire, Amazon is opening up another conduit for media consumption, not just books and magazines.

Amazon doesn’t want to sell more tablets to make money out of tablets. Amazon wants to sell more tablets to make money out of the services that it plans to sell using the tablet as a conduit.

Is Kindle Fire ready to eat away some of iPad share? Not yet. iPad has surpassed all expectations and is at a different level. But Kindle Fire would be a worthy opponent to iPad, if we can call it that.

Android tablets have to worry

Apple will be watching Amazon’s moves carefully, though it doesn’t have anything to worry as yet. The real companies which have to worry are the Samsungs, RIMs and umpteen other Android tablet makers. Amazon with its Kindle Fire, might as well show the world on how an Android tablet should be built and sold. May be, manufacturers like Samsung and HTC can take a cue from Amazon.

At $250, Amazon Kindle Fire, is a great value for money tablet. We expect the user experience to be similar or much better than its Kindle experience. Of course there are a lot of unknowns, but based on what you know so far, would you buy Amazon Kindle Fire?