The release by Jeff Bezos of a brace of new Kindle Fire tablets in the US and, for the first time, into the UK, shows that Amazon has gotten serious about its tablet business - and that it sees huge potential in selling content on the 7in devices.
Amazon is being cautious about how many of its products it sells internationally: the 8.9in version is not being released in the UK for now. That has fuelled speculation that Amazon's strategy here is the "games console" (or "razors/razorblades") strategy: sell the devices at or close to a loss and make up the difference through profit on the purchases that people make. The fact that the Kindle Fire comes pre-set with your Amazon account bolsters that idea.
Horace Dediu, of Asymco, reckoned that the first version of the Kindle Fire was simply made to a production run - his estimate was 5m - and that Amazon nursed that through to the announcement last week.
For the same reason he thinks that the latest batch of Kindle tablets has also been developed in the same way:
I think the total number of new Fire units to be sold has already been determined by a production order. You cannot think about the business from a demand point of view. If the product would be free then the demand would be infinite. The decision about how many will be "sold" will depend on the goodwill of the producer.
What Amazon tries to do with the brand is ensure that the Fire is in the hands of its most ravenous consumers.
That may well be true. But for consumers, the only questions are likely to be: how much does this cost, and how good are the specs. Here's the table of specifications:
The new Kindle Fire is slightly lighter (395g v 413g) than last year's and has a faster processor (1.2GHz v 1.0) and a newer version of Android (4.0 v 2.3). Note that Amazon is using its own version of Android - so it doesn't log on to Google's servers.
The "iPad mini" is of course unannounced and may not even exist - but we know that there have been internal emails in Apple suggesting it should be produced (this emerged at the Apple-Samsung trial) and that this is a burgeoning market: Amazon managed to sell between 5m and 8m 7in Kindle Fire tablets, even if it was at a slight loss.
What's noticeable is that the Kindle Fire HD offers the same better screen quality and more storage for the same price and faster access to content such as films than the Google Nexus 7.
That's an immediate problem for Google, which has been cutting it fine with the Nexus 7 anyway; it's a problem too for other Android tablet makers, which now have two unbeatable rivals.
It's a problem too for Apple - and the challenge of filling in those gaps, on storage, price and screen PPI in particular will be big.
(Update: to answer the question: why include a device that hasn't been announced? Because multiple separate sources point to it coming, and some guesses have pointed to size and screen; and to show the size of the challenge Apple has if it does get into this market.)
Corrected table to show that 8GB version of Nexus 7 is online-only, 16GB is in shops as well; and that equivalent Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 have same screen quality.
