Last week's announcements from Amazon absolutely rocked the tablet world. But it wasn't because they introduced 2 new e-readers, or because they dropped the prices of their other e-reader, or even the release of their new Kindle Fire tablet.
The reason Amazon's announcement was so huge is that the 7" Kindle Fire will retail for just $199.
This led to a firestorm (pun intended) of activity as companies like HTC and Blackberry slashed the prices of their 7" tablets, the Flyer and Playbook respectively, by hundreds of dollars. Other companies like Samsung and Toshiba, who have similarly-sized tablets set to debut before the end of the year, are rumored to be adjusting their prices as well because of what Amazon did.
So, even though not one Kindle Fire has been shipped yet, it has already shaken the Android tablet market to its core...and rightfully so. We haven't seen any Android tablet claim that mythic "iPad killer" title, mostly due to the fact that none of the premium tablets undercut the iPad on price.
The Kindle Fire takes a different approach. Instead of trying to beat the iPad on local storage size or unique design, Amazon made a physically different device (7" versus the iPad's 10") with a different purpose (heavy cloud streaming versus heavy app usage) aimed at a different consumer (casual media consumption versus heavy media consumption and mobile computing).
While it's a different strategy, Amazon is going with the basically the same approach as Apple when it comes to tablets. Both Apple and Amazon have spent years building up services like iTunes and Amazon Cloud Services before releasing their tablets.
This means that while existing Android tablets continue to deal with a fledgling OS in Honeycomb, Amazon will have an extensive media library at its disposal.
More importantly, while those other tablets continue to appeal to more technically-inclined people who don't want to be "stuck" in the Apple world, Amazon will appeal to those who like the ecosystem approach that has made Apple successful.
The end result is that Amazon, regardless of intent, may have put itself in line to go head-to-head with Tim Cook and company.
