The Wall Street Journal has covered Amazon’s much-rumored plans for a tablet, with a long and thoughtful article considering how such a device might affect the sales of Amazon’s Kindle, and what Amazon’s competitors in the e-book and digital media marketplaces are doing.
The piece has some interesting information from anonymous inside sources about what features the tablet will offer:
Amazon’s tablet will have a roughly nine-inch screen and will run on Google’s Android platform, said people familiar with the device. Unlike the iPad, it won’t have a camera, one of these people said. While the pricing and distribution of the device is unclear, the online retailer won’t design the initial tablet itself. It also is outsourcing production to an Asian manufacturer, the people said.
Nowhere is there any mention of the two-faced combo tablet rumor started last week by some guy on an airplane; I would be rather inclined to doubt it at this point. However, it does mention Sony has been showing off a tablet and a dual-screened, wallet-shaped device which will offer access to Sony games, e-books, apps, and multimedia content. Sony hasn’t done very well with its e-book readers so far, and its portable multimedia players have fizzled, but it has had reasonable success in the portable gaming field. It will be interesting to see how this will affect the tablet and e-reader marketplaces.
(Found via Publishing Perspectives.)
The missing camera may be a hint. The iPad is designed for both creation and consumption. Amazon may release a tablet focusing solely on media consumption. What’s in hardware may matter less that what comes with the package. That might include streaming movies, TV shows, and perhaps music from Amazon for little or nothing. Movies not available for streaming could be sold at a discount and, once seen, will be stored in the cloud for later viewing. In short, Amazon won’t directly compete with Apple. That would be foolish. Its tablet will be a Kindle but for movies rather than books. And given Netflix’s recent price increases, it may prove a winner.