IT has been a busy few weeks in the world of tech with new products galore, including the much anticipated Amazon Kindle Fire, which should help define the tablet market.
The tablet market has been probably the most interesting area of high-tech hardware for a few years now. We have actually had tablet PCs for many years, and some manufacturers made some pretty good tablet offerings, but the bulk of them ran Windows and were expensive, and in some ways cumbersome. The best of them were convertible notebooks, from Lenovo and Toshiba that fit a very small niche market, and had very little in the way of software support.
That all changed when Apple released the iPad, a dedicated tablet with its own OS and a rapidly growing number of tablet-specific software options. Hot on its heels came the Android and other tablets, all vainly trying to catch Apple which was running away with the market.
None have really eaten into Apple's market and there is good reason for that. None, that is, until now. The Kindle Fire will be a player, and between the iPad and the Fire, not much room will be left for the pretenders.
The reason that no other tablet has challenged the iPad is simple, but profound; it is iTunes.
I have long maintained that Steve Jobs' biggest success story when the book is written will be iTunes, and it is iTunes that makes the iPad such a tour de force. The wealth of content, easy delivery system, trusted payment model and open-ended nature (easy to expand) have made it the cornerstone of Apple's growth.
Amazon took the exact same path, from a completely different direction, they first built the content, in the Amazon online store, and now are adding the hardware to leverage that content (Kindle and now Fire).
The main reason no other tablet is going to rise to significance is no other company can offer the content. It is as simple as that.
The fact that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezeos would launch his much-anticipated tablet without about half the features of the dominant iPad, or even many of the Android's, tells the tale. The Fire has no camera, no Bluetooth, no 3G, no GPS. That is a huge number of features to ignore, but it makes no difference. It is what it has that tells the tale. It has access to Amazon's huge media library, books, movies music, to their new app store and perhaps most importantly a proprietary browser, called Silk. Silk is being optimized to do several things, but from the consumer's point of view, it should be a very fast and clean web browser, which will allow Amazon to assure their users have a good online experience.
The bottom line is that both Apple's iPad and the Fire are just containers to pour content into, and both Apple and Amazon make money from the majority of the content you access on their devices.
In my opinion, the Fire and iPad will both prosper, and it has little to do with the feature set of each offering. It has everything to do with the companies behind the tablets, and the ecosystem of content they deliver.
So Samsung, ASUS, Toshiba and all the other tablet wannabes had better have a huge rethink on how they are going to thrive, if not survive, in the Amazon/Apple tablet world.
Steve Dotto is host of Dotto Tech, Wednesdays at 6 p.m. on AM 650. Visit him online at www.dottotech.com or at www. facebook.com/dottotech.
