A report from Digitimes is detailing Amazon’s plans to initiate a price cut of the successful Kindle Fire to a bargain basement $150 in order to make way for their new model. The news that Amazon is looking to release a model to succeed the current model is to be expected as the outfit will look to repeat last year’s incredible holiday season sales by keeping that stellar $199 price-tag. The Kindle fire has been more than just successful for the company as the budget-device has secured them a position in the tablet market as a big player.
The report also details a new model of the Fire to weigh in at a larger 10.1″, it’d be interesting to see how Amazon’s heavily skinned version of Gingerbread will scale up to that size or whether Amazon will go with a skinned an altered version of Ice Cream Sandwich that is now, of course open source and free for anyone to tinker with. Amazon’s play with the larger screened tablet will, more than likely be aimed at their Amazon Prime video outlets. With the larger tablet market a lot more crowded with premium devices from the likes of ASUS and Samsung, Amazon will have their work cut out to produce a viable option for buyers. Especially considering that people are more likely to do work on tablets of that size and Google’s offerings are a lot better suited to the productivity side of things.
Cutting the price to $150 would position the Kindle Fire as the lowest priced Android tablet that actually packed a pretty decent screen along with some relatively powerful hardware but, more importantly a tablet that has a powerful eco-system that can provide vast amounts of content. By the end of the year looks like it’s going to be a bit of a shake up in the tablet world with viable low priced tablets incoming from Google and Amazon alike as well as a rumoured iPad Mini.
[Source: Digitimes via TechCrunch]