Thursday, September 29, 2011

What Hides Behind Amazon Fire's Pricetag

Photo: The Verge
Today I came across some news regarding the launch of two new cheap Kindle eReader versions and an Android tablet (YES!) by Amazon. My interest took a crest when I delved deeper into the tablet- Fire. It was really cheap! $199. That's it. I said- Well, that's a great deal. Moved on with reading the whole specs.

Now I realized something, very interesting. The new Fire tablet HAD to be cheap. Reason- The tablet featured only an 8GB worth of and internal memory and no additional SD card slots for and memory expansion. Further despite being an Android tablet one would not have the facility to access the Android Market.

Why so? Well, let's see the big picture. Amazon has, first, it's own store. Why let Google feast the cookie then. Secondly, Amazon is moving ahead with the next gen cloud services. So in case you run short of the meager 8GB memory on your Fire tomorrow, Amazon's waiting to offer you it's cloud service.

Hence, what I sense here is that hidden behind the catchy price tag were the bars that caged you into solitary confinement. Sorry Amazon, a $100 more and I'd live the rest of my life, a freeman, at least.

Are we looking at the third dimension of the tablet era that leads to the combination of the open source policies of Android for developmental openness and those of Apple for usage terms? What do you have to say about it? Do share your views in your comments.