MINYANVILLE ORIGINAL Amazon (AMZN) gave would-be entrants into the red-hot e-reader segment something to think about yesterday: Your device is only as good as the services that back it up.
During a Santa Monica press conference to unveil new versions of its popular line of tablets, Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos said that the Kindle Fire HD sports two antennas and utilizes the 5 GHz wireless band because the more popular bands are too crowded.
But the new, more powerful Kindles are also backed up by Amazon’s wide array of services, something that Bezos was sure to point out now that the tablet market is becoming crowded with new players.
Amazon will offer two versions of the Kindle Fire HD: A 7-inch screen with 16 GB will retail for $199, and an 8.9-inch screen that will sell for $299. The smaller version goes on sale later this month and its larger cousin hits Amazon.com in November.
During the media event, while Bezos demonstrated popular computer games and played high-def movies on the two new models, he said he’d envisioned creating such devices decades ago. But he was only able to bring them to market now because the technology didn’t previously exist to give them the computing power they needed. (Bezos quipped that 8 GB HD tablets are dead on arrival.)
The new Kindles score one for the concept of convergence. Bezos, the Web’s bookselling pioneer, moved the world one step closer to the day when everyone is connected by their all-in-one computer/e-reader/telephone. “This is a very important step for Amazon,” a technology analyst for Gartner Group, Michael Gartenberg, says. “The new version of the Kindle shows that digital ecosystems are more important than devices.”
Gartenberg says Amazon is putting other tablet vendors on notice because it’s backed by the company’s dedicated book services. Even Apple (AAPL), which has remained in a solid position because of its popular iPad, should take notice.
Bezos knows a thing or two about creating and defining a market only to have creative disrupters move in fast. A little over a year ago, Bezos unveiled the original Amazon Kindle Fire during a similar press conference. Not long after, Google (GOOG) and Barnes & Noble (BKS) announced their own 7-inch tablets.
One of the most interesting facets of the press conference was that Bezos announced the new Kindles would run on Android, the free operating system developed by Google. Yet the new Kindle Fire HD won’t offer Google services. “There was no mention of Google,” says Gartenberg. “It was essentially Jeff Bezos saying: Thanks [Google founders] Serge and Larry – now go away. Amazon has its own big set of services.”
To what extent his fellow media moguls tried to pry information on the new Kindles from Bezos during Herb Allen’s Sun Valley conference in July is unknown. But one thing is clear: Technology companies are well aware of the trend towards a single, hand-held, personal device that will be anything anyone needs to connect to the world.
Still, the Amazon press conference put to rest rumors that Bezos would unveil a smartphone of his own. He’s sticking to the e-reader segment, a category he still dominates and knows best.
Amazon’s CEO knows all too well that the best hardware doesn’t always survive without the right digital ecosystem to back it up. It’s hard to believe that Motorola (MSI) unveiled the original Razr in 2004, which went on to become a smash hit. But just years later, sales of the stylish mobile phone plummeted with the advent of the first generation of smartphones.
Yesterday, Motorola itself unveiled a new incarnation of smartphones – and branded them with the Razr name.
