SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Amazon announced a
barrage of new tablets and e-readers on Thursday that makes its challenge to
Apple’s iPad a little more serious.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief, holds the new
Amazon Kindle Fire HD, which comes in two sizes.
Amazon announced updates to its line of
Kindle e-readers, including the Kindle Fire HD, a tablet computer that comes in
two sizes, one that is nearly as large as the iPad and that undercuts its price
by $200.
The company also announced the Kindle
Paperwhite, a new version of the black-and-white Kindle that is thinner and
turns pages 15 percent quicker than its predecessor. It also has a new
high-contrast screen that Amazon says will be easier to read, especially in the
dark because it is lighted from the bottom.
The company now has seven models ranging
from a basic $70 black-and-white-screen e-reader to a $600 color tablet. (It
also still sells an aging model with a keyboard.)
“We are not building the best tablet at a certain price,” said Jeff
Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, who showed off the new devices at an airport
hangar in Santa Monica. “We’re building the best tablet at any price.”
The Kindle Fire HD challenges the iPad on
several fronts. The larger version of the device has an 8.9-inch display,
compared with the iPad’s 9.7 inches. The new Amazon device also has a
front-facing camera that works with the built-in Skype video conferencing
software, competing directly with the front-facing camera on the iPad and
Apple’s FaceTime video conferencing features. Like the iPad, the new Kindle
Fire offers 16 gigabytes of storage.
The larger version of the Kindle Fire HD
costs $300; the baseline iPad costs $500. (Apple sells an older model for
$400.) Amazon is also offering a $500 version of the Kindle Fire HD with cellular
data connectivity, which is cheaper than Apple’s least expensive iPad with
cellular connectivity, which costs $630.
During the presentation, Mr. Bezos
continually compared the Kindle Fire HD with Apple’s iPad, talking about both
the features of his tablet and its price. In an interview after the event, Mr.
Bezos said, “You can’t ignore Apple being a company that is a major player in
this arena.”
But he said there was room for both
companies to do well. “My view: these are huge, huge markets, with room for
lots of winners.”
Mr. Bezos said Amazon does not compare
itself to Apple when designing the devices. “Our first approach on this is to
make sure what we are doing is to follow our own philosophies, our own path,
our own way. Then, of course, we look around and see what others are doing.”
One innovation of Amazon’s is that using
its X-ray feature for movies played on the Kindle Fire HD, viewers will be able
to click on an actor in a movie and find out more about him or her using the
IMDb.com movie and TV database, which Amazon owns.
Amazon was also defending itself from
Google, which recently introduced a seven-inch tablet, called the Nexus 7, for
$200. Amazon announced an upgraded version of a seven-inch color screen Kindle
Fire tablet on Thursday for $159.
Amazon’s approach to selling the devices is
quite different from Apple’s. Amazon, an online retailer, still makes its money
selling the content; Apple profits on its devices. “Amazon’s services are the
core of its devices, and the devices enhance Amazon’s service: a virtuous cycle
where Amazon gains an increasing share of consumers’ wallets,” wrote Sarah
Rotman Epps, a Forrester Research analyst who specializes in tablets, in a
company blog post on Thursday.
Amazon has worked with a number of partners
— including Facebook, Microsoft and game developers — to create applications
specifically for the Kindle Fire HD. The apps are for sale through Amazon,
along with other material like video, music and books. Amazon is far ahead of
its competitors in offering its software on dozens of devices like smartphones,
tablets and e-readers, including Apple’s iPad and iPhone.
Amazon does not disclose sales figures for
its Kindle line, but it did provide a hint last week when it said the Fire had
captured 22 percent of the United States tablet market.
Apple has sold more than 84 million iPads
worldwide since its debut in 2010 and says it has sold 44 million iPads around
the world so far this year.
According to the latest forecasts from
Forrester, Americans are expected to own 60.7 million tablets and 40.2 million
e-readers by the end of this year. Microsoft said it would enter the fray with
the Surface, and many PC makers are building tablets with Google’s Android or
Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.
While Amazon emphasized the top end of the
market, it also shored up the bottom with the $120 Paperwhite device. In adding
a lighted screen, Amazon matched an innovation introduced last year in Barnes
& Noble’s Nook. Amazon said the battery of the Kindle Paperwhite could last
for eight weeks.
A version of the device with free cellular
data service will cost $180. Both will ship on Oct. 1 but can be ordered now.
With the latest updates to the Kindle line,
Amazon seems to be putting its corporate acquisitions to use. The touch screen
added to the Kindle Paperwhite most likely comes from Amazon’s acquisition of
TouchCo, a start-up it bought in 2010 that specialized in touch-screen
technology. The light system is probably from Modilis, a Finnish company Amazon
also bought in 2010.
When asked about rumors that Amazon was
building either a phone or a television to distribute the company’s content,
Mr. Bezos didn’t dismiss the idea.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Mr. Bezos said. “We won’t do something
unless we think we have some interesting new way to do it.”
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