Amazon Inc. is going to have a very busy week the first week of September. On September the 6th, the Internet content giant will be releasing details of the next generation Kindle Fire, though the details of the announcement are still up for speculation.
The company is taking some interesting steps in preparation of this announcement with the detailing on Amazon.com that the Kindle Fire product is ‘Currently Unavailable’; on August 30th, it stated that the most innovative and best-selling product for Amazon EVER has effectively sold out – forever. The only models available on the site any longer are second hand tablets.
“We’re grateful to the millions of customers who have made Kindle Fire the most successful product launch in the history of Amazon,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “This has been a big year for digital products on Amazon—all of the top 10 sellers on Amazon.com since Kindle Fire launched just less than a year ago are digital products. Kindle Fire is sold out, but we have an exciting roadmap ahead—we will continue to offer our customers the best hardware, the best prices, the best customer service, the best cross-platform interoperability, and the best content ecosystem.”
The “…exciting roadmap ahead” that Bezos refers to, at least in part, will be revealed on the 6th.
New Models
It is as confirmed as possible, prior to the official announcement, that there will be a new 7-inch version of the tablet available. The new Fire will have better resolution for the screen, increasing to 1280×800 from 1024×600, which will put its display on par with the Google’s 7-inch Nexus 7. The new model may be thinner and rely slightly more on metal in the construction. There may also be an integrated camera for Skype conversations and technology to support location finding capabilities.
As a side-note with the location services, Amazon has decided to bypass Google’s Map services and forge a relationship with Nokia OYJ, as they own one of the largest mapping-content companies globally. It is unknown if the tech will be a true GPS chip, or hardware that allows for WiFi triangulation.
It has been speculated for months that the new release of this product would involve a 10-inch tablet of some kind, and unfortunately, nothing has been confirmed about this larger product as of this writing. Several sources do not have anything concrete where the larger tablet is concerned, so it will remain to be seen on Thursday what Jeff Bezos has to say about it.
The new 7-inch model, however, is further rumored to be sub-divided into an Ad-supported Fire and a Non-Ad-supported Fire. The Ad-supported model would be offered at a slightly lower price point, naturally, and apparently present the user with an advertisement every time that the tablet was ‘awakened’.
Both Wall Street and technophiles will be watching with great anticipation to see what happens with this tablet. Amazon has 4.2% of tablet sales worldwide, behind Samsung with 9.2% and Apple with almost 70%. Depending on what is offered with this product and how it is received globally, it could take a significant bite out of future sales from its competition.