Amazon love to shout about their prices on the Kindle line and in fact, not so long ago they were advertising a Kindle and two Kindle Fires for the same price as an iPad. There’s no doubting the stupid price of an iPad versus capable Android tablets out there and the Kindle Fire – before the Nexus 7 hit the scene – was the best tablet for $200. That model of the Fire has just sold out and the company is gearing up to launch new Kindle products next month. However, it looks like the online giant is already looking ahead to the future of both their Kindle Readers and the Fire tablet line. By putting them together in one device.
As the patent filing above suggests it looks like Amazon have some firm plans to sandwich together a Kindle Fire and Kindle Reader onto one tablet. Making one side perfect for reading books from the Kindle store and then watch those Amazon Prime videos on the Fiery side. If anything, this looks like Amazon putting a placeholder on things as the company doesn’t want to raise the price of their Kindles too high as it seems to be their winning factor against the iPad and other tablets out there. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a Kindle like this, this time next year. It’s not behind the realms of possibility, eReaders are getting thinner and thinner as too, are ARM based boards. The challenge for Amazon will be whether or not they can make a design that works and is appealing to the general consumer – just like the Kindle Fire before it.
It’s starting to like Amazon are taking a leaf out of Google’s book and focussing on the hardware to enable customers to enjoy all of the content that they supply. Having the two devices together would please a lot of Kindle aficionados out there as I’m sure many of them find the Fire’s screen to be a stress on their eyes after some time, having the best of both worlds however, would be near perfect. I wouldn’t expect anything to come of this patent filing for some time to come but, it sure looks like Amazon is here to stay in the tablet market – if we didn’t think they were already.