Amazon's Kindle Fire would rework the entire tablet market

Amazon launched Kindle fire yesterday with some real good hardware specs (excellent colour screen, dual core processor) and a mouth-watering price of $199 only (roughly around Rs. 9000).

No doubt, other devices that were launched simultaneously by Amazon such as the regular Kindle and Kindle touch would also have their own demand but in actual tablet market terms, it's only the Kindle fire which can be called a competition to iPad, Samsung tablet, Motorola Xoom and other contenders.

At this price point, Amazon is simply trying to sell the hardware so that it can make more money later by selling books, movies, music, apps through its app store. This is similar to the strategy used by Gillette (which sells razors, literally for free and makes money by selling blades, gels, accessories).

The reason Amazon can do it is because it has an offering very similar to Apple where it's controlling the device, platform (it has a modified version of Android) and app store. Hence, it's looking at a long term revenue by following a penetration pricing strategy. In doing so, it's also utilizing its existing capacity of billions of gigabytes of cloud storage combined with Amazon silk interface for faster loading of webpages to provide a better user experience.

The reason other tablet players in the market such as Samsung, HTC, Motorola among others can't follow this strategy, with the exception of apple, is because they only control the device part and have very little control over Android platform (controlled by Google) or app store (again influenced by Google).

However, these other Android tablet players have huge money pockets and Samsung has already made a decently successful 10" tablet which sold 1 million pieces in 2 months since its launch. Hence, these bigger players would continue to survive with their larger 10" screen Android tablets since Kindle fire is currently being launched in 7" version only. Apple anyways is the uncrowned leader in premium tablets segment and would continue to do so, though it might have to rework its pricing strategy in coming months.

The biggest casualty of Kindle fire launch is most likely to be other mid-to-low price range tablets such as those being sold by Reliance 3G, iBall, etc. in the Indian market today which are all made by OEMs such as  ZTE, Huawei,etc. These might have decent specs at the price range they are present today but Kindle Fire is sure to completely throw their marketing plans off for a toss.

We at Know Your Mobile India have already seen through our recent survey that 90% of Indian technology enthusiasts would like to buy a tablet. Hence, we expect Kindle fire to be a sure shot hit in Indian market.

Let's just hope that Amazon doesn't charge too much shipping charges from US to India delivery for now, so that even Indian fanboys can get their hands on the Kindle Fire right at the launch.

Meanwhile, telecom players such as Vodafone, Airtel, Aircel would have their task cut out to get Kindle Fire under their umbrella for India launch, whenever that happens. Hopefully soon!