Will Tablet Price War Mean a Larger Amazon Tablet? 67
An anonymous reader writes "PC Magazine reports that even while Amazon was building their Kindle Fire tablet, it was already planning on a much larger model that 'will be its marquee product and the hopeful cornerstone of its tablet strategy.' Amazon's already begun offering $30 discounts on refurbished 7-inch Kindle Fire tablets, matching last week's new aggressive pricing from Barnes and Noble on their color touchscreen Nook. But PCMag argues that the 7-inch color Kindle was simply a 'beta' release of the larger device to come. 'In no way was Amazon being dishonest with its customers... To be truly fair, many people may never want a screen larger than seven inches because of the associated weight and bulk.' But the author argues that its real purpose may have been as a test run to gather important real-world data for their ultimate war with the iPad. 'After all, as industry insiders joke, all first-generation products, whether hardware or software, are really "beta" programs disguised as initial launches.'"
Re:All in favor of a price war (Score:5, Interesting)
Rumor: iPad 2 to be discontinued next Wed (Score:3, Interesting)
THe best rumor I've heard so far is that the ipad2 will see a price drop to make it more cost competitive with kindle fire. We'll see in a few days.
It is rumored today Monday Feb 27 that...
Apple is dropping all models of the iPad 2 next Wednesday except for a single 16 GB iPad 2 WiFi model. That will be the low ball to bring people into Best Buys, Target, Wal-Mart, Sams etc. It may even be for sale in educational channels as part of Apple's new iTextBook agenda.
Think of this as the 16GB iPad with a huge ten inch iron spike in it to prevent too many from walking out the door. The retail sales people are supposed to 'step' the customer up to a real iPad, the iPad3 in HD, which by the way is going to be significantly more expensive then previous iPad models.
I think the price jump is seventy or eighty dollars on the low end in todays iPad 3 rumors.
I think the new price increase will go a long way to give Android tablets some breathing room in the 2012 market. The only problem I have seen is that most of the Android Tablets are still undesirable compared to the iPad ecosystem. Even Amazon is seeing returns of between 25% to 33%.
Realistically competing tablets still have to sell for less, sometimes a lot less, to move the product in 2012.
That is simply Google's fault and they appear to be trying to remedy the situation the best they can.