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Amazon’s Table Is A Service Not A Tablet

I think this is really interesting.  Maybe you’ve heard of Amazon’s new tablet for $199.  That’s a really attractive price hey?  It almost makes you want to just run out and get one because they’re so cheap.  I suspect that’s exactly what Amazon wants us to do.  They want to flood the market with these low cost tablets that they can then use to help sell more Amazon stuff.  Amazing Idea:

Jeff Bezos is channeling Steve Jobs. Its mid-September and the wiry billionaire founder of Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is at his brand new corporate headquarters in Seattle, in a building named Day One South after his conviction that 17-year-old Amazon is still in its infancy.

Almost giddy with excitement, Bezos retrieves one by one the new crop of dirt-cheap Kindle e-readers — they start at $79 — from a hidden perch on a chair tucked into a conference room table. When hes done showing them off, he stands up, and, for an audience of a single journalist, announces, Now, Ive got one more thing to show you. He waits a half-beat to make sure the reference to Jobs famous line from Apple Inc. (AAPL) presentations hasnt been missed, then gives his notorious barking laugh.

With that, Bezos pulls out the Kindle Fire, Amazons long- anticipated tablet computer — and the first credible response to the Apple iPad, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Oct. 3 edition.

Unlike a wave of other tablets that have emerged hopefully only to flop, such as the Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) TouchPad, the Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. Xoom, and the Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) PlayBook, the Kindle Fire has a good shot at turning the newest theater of war in high-tech into a two-tablet battle.

With a 7-inch display, the Fire is about half the size of the iPad. At $199, its also less than half the price of the cheapest Apple model. Amazon has painted over the rough surfaces of Google Inc. (GOOG)s Android operating system with a fresh and easy- to-use interface and tied the device closely to its own large and growing content library. Kindle Fire owners can watch the film Rio, scroll through magazines such as The New Yorker or Esquire, and access their music collection on Amazons servers.

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