Amazon Kindle Fire: The iPad Alternative

Kindle Fire: The iPad Alternative

KINDLE FIRE DOMINATES SHARE OF LOW-END TABLET BUYERS

Maritz Research

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45% of low-end committed tablet buyers bought an Amazon Kindle Fire.
16% of low-end buyers ended up getting an iPad.
Low-end buyers constitute 22% of the tablet market.

THOUGHT: Low-end buyers are defined as those customers who plan to spend $250 or less on a tablet.

If you’ve been reading The Daily Numbers for a while, you know that I’ve been all about the Kindle Fire’s potential as a popular consumer electronics device. At the $200 price point, I figured it would be a popular alternative to people not wanting to shell out $300 more dollars for an iPad.

Looks like I was right.

Investment bank Morgan Keegan recently reduced it’s iPad shipping estimates by the 3 million units, believing Apple lost one to two million iPad sales to the Kindle Fire. They believe the Fire likely sold for to five million units.

My Kindle Fire arrived today and I’ve had a little time to play with it.

My hands-on experience confirms what I expected: It is very much a content consumption device. Given the seven inch screen size, I’m not expecting to be get much work done on the device, but I definitely will be watching a lot of video, reading books, and listening to music with the Fire.

I’ve spoken before about the opportunity businesses and brands have to market on the Kindle through eBooks. Now that there’s a tablet version of the Kindle, you can now consider creating interactive eBooks.

From the Fire’s home screen, in addition to your eBooks, you have access to a Newsstand, Music, Video, Docs, Apps and the Web. Within the Music category, you have access to the music you’ve purchased through Amazon and/or have uploaded to your cloud player. Through the Newsstand, you have access to eMagazine to which you’ve subscribed through Amazon. Within the Video section, you’ve got access to streaming videos from the Amazon Prime service and/or videos you’ve bought through Amazon. In the Docs section you’ll find any documents you’ve emailed to your Kindle. And in the Apps section, you have access to any apps you’ve installed through Amazon’s Android Apps store. The Fire comes with an Amazon Store app pre-installed, of course.

Maybe the eBook route wont work for you. How bout an eMagazine? Do you have audio or video content? Or maybe an app for the Kindle Fire makes more sense for you.

But whatever makes most sense for you, unless you’ve got an instantly recognizable brand that people will seek out by name, you’ll also need to ensure your content is properly optimized so it can be found through the Kindle Fire search function.

Finally, when you consider all of the smart phones on the market, the iPad and now the Kindle Fire, responsive Web design is likely to be a hot topic this year. Responsive design, if you haven’t yet heard of it, is the idea that your web site is smart enough to understand the device that is viewing it and it re-formats to accommodate for that device. So, for example, a person visiting your site from their desktop machine might get a navigation menu designed for pointing and clicking while someone visiting the site on a tablet would get a navigation system suitable for swiping.

CLIENT: The Lowry in Uptown Minneapolis, a Blue Plate Restaurant, is hosting a Twin Cities Thursday Happy Hour event with a panel on Social Media & Food on January 19 starting at 5:15 PM. [REGISTER]

FOLLOW FRIDAY: @TheLowryMN, of course!

Thank you for humor.

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