Amazon Kindle vs. The Apple iPad
The Amazon Kindle Fire, introduced September 28, 2011 is actually going to expand the total available market for e-readers and tablet devices including the Apple iPad. Rather than the two competing, both will form a very powerful market catalyst that will broaden hardware, software, and content support for each platform (Romero, 2010). The intent of this analysis is to explain the differences between each and why both will serve to expand the market overall.
Serving Significantly Different Markets
The Amazon Kindle Series was initially developed for those tablet users who want to be content consumers and curators, not necessarily creators (Lai, Chang, 2011). Amazon's business model with the Kindle is to concentrate on moving as many books and other forms of content off of their physical shelves onto their servers by making them e-books and Kindle books (Kroeker, 2009). The Kindle then becomes the engine of the new business model Amazon is relying on to continually keep their gross margins and profitability increasing (Shields, 2011). The Kindle has been specifically designed for this purpose; it is purely a consumption device, not one to produce content as the iPad is.
The iPad has significantly more functionality...
The inclusion of a high resolution camera and application software that enables digital video editing, titling and seamless integration to YouTube and other video sites make the iPad a low-edn digital content creation device (Lai, Chang, 2011). Families are beginning to replace their video cameras with Apple iPads for taking family pictures and videos of their kids playing sports and being in school activities (Perenson, 2011a). Now its second generation, the Apple iPad2 has emerged as a viable portable platform, comparable in functionality to smartphones yet having the features of a full netbook (Drew, 2011).
As can be seen from this analysis, each device meets a fundamentally different market need. The design decisions made to create the Kindle Fire confirm this is a device meant for content consumption. It has a touch screen 7" wide, only 8GB of memory and support for the Amazon Cloud, support for Adobe Flash (critically important in e-books) and has no camera and no applications to support content creation (writing, editing, content curation) and a price of $199 (Sinha, 2011) (Fox, 2011). The Apple…
