That's exactly right. Even the cheapest Android tablets from Archos feature 3.2 - 80 G9 for instance at $299. And you can have Kindle, Amazon MP3 and Instant Video on it as it supports Flash. So why would I want to buy a $300 Amazon tablet?
That's not to say it won't sell well - brand and integration might make it work and Amazon never discloses how many Kindles they sell - but it's hard to argue Apple is going to sweat. B&N may be but not Apple and not any other Android Tablet maker.
Were you guys asleep when iPad launched to almost identical criticism, then sold 30 million units?
The game is not about specs anymore. It's about experience.
Amazon has banked a lot of credibility with regard to making great portable hardware and streamlining the content consumption experience. You're seeing this the wrong way around.
People aren't going to buy this because they want a tablet. You and a few hundred thousand other people (technophiles) are the only ones who care about "tablets" that aren't the iPad.
People are going to buy this because they love reading books and love watching movies. And oh, what a convenient and neat way to accomplish that task! What a great gift! etc.
It's going to feel good to use. If that didn't matter to Amazon, it would be running the latest OS they could slap on it, it'd have a spec sheet a mile long, and it would cost a nose more than the iPad.
But that's not their game. They're coming at it from the opposite direction.
And fucking finally – Apple will have a competitor in this space who isn't a complete joke. I'm very, very excited to watch this unfold.
I never understood why people insist on intentionally crippled specs before jumping on the experience is everything bandwagon.
Amazon has good specs for the hardware there - it would not have altered their proposition drastically to ship modern OS on it along with support for Email client and many other experience enhancing things that it comes with - UI acceleration, more app compatibility etc. It's nearly free for them. At $300 price point it behooves them to make it a full tablet along with a reader and media player. Without that it's just not a good value in my mind.
Amazon's customizations are purportedly deeper and better then Honeycomb. Proof will be in the pudding of course but if you were doing a significant fork you can't just keep restarting over and over to incorporate everything Google is doing too.
In that case it would be a huge gaffe on Amazon's part. Amazon will have to be responsible for the full OS and it will be a nightmare for them to integrate whatever Google is pushing out every 6 months, including security fixes.
But let's put that aside - think about compatibility from user stand point. Google's app store is still the main Android app store and is likely to be so going forward. If Google and its partners start pushing out newer releases that Amazon fails to incorporate in their 2.1 tree - users are going to miss out on apps - when they have a 2011 era dual core hardware that they paid $300 for.
Again if this was $100-$179 it would be OK - $300 is what makes this not attractive.
Keep in mind that it wouldn't be particularly difficult for the Kindle tablet to outsell all the other Android tablets put together. If that proves to be the case, why would they have any difficulty attracting apps?
Walk us through the level of customization Amazon has done here, explain at a high level the goals and tradeoffs they sought in forking Android, and show how the product would have shipped on-time, for the holidays, by making the simple change of completely replacing the operating system they'd already spent so much time to customize.
I really don't think you're hearing me, here. This isn't an "Android tablet." This is Amazon's Kindle, which will succeed on its own merits, and just happens to have some deep technical underpinnings in Android.
This isn't about the specs. This is about taking some raw material and shaping it into something that meets their goals. They've done that. Can it be even more impressive? Always. And I'm sure at some point they'll merge in a bunch of the technical junk that only 0.1% of their users care about, in the furtherance of the experience.
But I think, out of the box, they're already going to be heads-and-shoulders above their "competition," such as it is.
I get what you are trying to say - believe me, I do. I just don't think that at $300 this is a good value. This may be Android tablet or a non-Android Kindle - $300 is not something ( I think ) people will pay for a limited thing that looks like all the other tablets but doesn't quite work like it. At $179 may be you have a point. But as you approach the Archos to iPad price range you can't just sell experience to people - you have to sell experience and all the regular stuff competition ships, you know like an email client! There is no excuse for omitting a great email client at that price range.
You seriously think Apple would have sold as many iPads if they sold it with iOS 1.x version of the browser and no email client, purely based on experience? I don't think so.
So again - our debate here is about price, features and experience. You can change the order but I think excluding any one or more thing at $300 is not really a good thing.
And you and me can argue to no end that it's not Android or it doesn't really matter that it's Android - but Amazon has an "Android" App Store and they sell apps through that and people are going to be expecting to see some apps that they won't either due to them not being compatible or not on the Amazon app store or in the best case just not working good enough due to running on an older OS with deep 3rd party customizations.
And upgrades being nearly free for Amazon - It's Google's code, they just have to rebase and deal with kernel/hardware bits just like every other vendor. The customizations probably are all Java and easily mergeable atop newer AOSP releases - if they aren't then that's bad news already. But let me be clear that even if it wasn't nearly free - as a user I don't really care - I want a reasonably secure and updated OS with no artificial limitations if I am paying $300.
Hardware specs are the only thing you're truly locked into, as you'll receive firmware updates after the fact. Also, consider that even a $500 price point is not so terribly high. It's above the "I want it, don't even think, just buy it" threshold of most folks but it's pretty far down the discretionary spending ladder. In inflation adjusted dollars it's about 1/10th of the launch price of the Apple II for example. Sometimes the value of having and using something you want for several months or a year outweighs the disadvantages of a prematurely purchase.
That's not to say it won't sell well - brand and integration might make it work and Amazon never discloses how many Kindles they sell - but it's hard to argue Apple is going to sweat. B&N may be but not Apple and not any other Android Tablet maker.