When the Nexus 7 was paraded around the stage of I/O this year it was obvious that the Kindle Fire was about to fizzle out. The Fire was a strong player in the tablet game late last year for the same reason that the Nexus 7 is now, quality hardware, a good ecosystem and a great price to boot.
The Fire however, can’t even begin to match up with the Nexus 7 now as the latest from Google comes with a revamped OS, the ability to play near console quality games and benefit from having a pure Android experience onboard as well. The price of Fire is also not looking as bright as it once did as now the Nexus 7 is ridiculous value for money, at $199 for a quad-core beast with 8GB of storage, the Fire looks a little pricey now.
To this end, Analysts that were once setting the Fire up for another wave of huge success have had to rethink things. Kevin Kopelman, an analyst from the firm, Cowen, has cut his full-year forecast of unit sales of the Fire from 14 million to 12 million. Of course, 12 million is a large number whichever way you look at it but, for an analyst that believed in the success of the Fire to cut it by 2 million shows that the Nexus 7 is going to have an effect on the Fire and, more importantly the tablet business on a whole. Of interest to note as well as the cut to the Fire forecast is Kopelman’s forecast of growth for the Kindle e-reader, that was forecasted for a thirty per cent rise has now been re-assessed as a three per cent growth at best. This is mostly due to Amazon’s own focus on the Fire but, with Google rolling out Books in more and more countries and featuring it heavily on the Nexus 7 they look set to become a player in digital reading as well.
[Source: CNet]