Will the Kindle Fire make the 7-inch tabled really take off?
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.”
And could it bring us the kind of net security we've only dreamed of?
In fact, it looks to me as though Amazon has a remarkable security opportunity here. It controls the Fire hardware, the Fire operating system, and the Fire user's internet connection. If a Fire tablet joins a botnet, Amazon will know immediately. It can quarantine the tablet and alert the owner. Indeed, it can go further, performing diagnostics to figure out and remedy the security flaw the botnet exploited. If a Fire tablet starts sending beacons or massive encrypted data files to a Chinese controller site, Amazon can spot the pattern and alert the user or even block the transmissions. No one else, not even Apple, maybe not even DoD, will have the same ability to drive security into all parts of the Internet ecosystem.
If Amazon exploits its security opportunity, this could be transformative for users. To take one example, most people are, or should be, wary about Internet financial transactions. Small businesses that do electronic funds transfers are at enormous risk today. Like consumers, their machines are easily compromised, but unlike consumers, their losses to hackers are not underwritten by the banks. That's costing them easily hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As small businesses come to appreciate the risk, Amazon has a chance to persuade them that a dirt-cheap Amazon Fire tablet is the only safe way to access their funds.
I'm not sure about either of those two things, but the $200 price tag got me off the do-I-really-need-a-tablet fence. I was online last week ordering a birthday present for my brother, and I just pre-ordered it on impulse. This isn't quite the all-in-one device I've been waiting for -- no camera, no phone, no creative tools -- but it seems to be about the best deal around for media consumption. I can transfer all the books I already have in my Kindle library and add music, movies and TV episodes, magazines, newspapers and apps -- all of it in the cloud and ready for me to tap into from anywhere. All that and blazing-speed access to the Web and email, too. Hard to resist,
