亚马逊 Kindle

亚马逊 Kindle "WE ARE building premium products and offering them at non-premium prices," crowed Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, as he unveiled a collection of new Kindle devices on September 28th. Among them was the Kindle Fire, which represents the company’s first foray into the tablet-computing market. Priced at a mere $199, the new device, which has a seven-inch colour touch-screen, could pose the biggest threat yet to Apple’s iPad, which has dominated the tablet arena since its launch last year. Amazon also launched several new black-and-white Kindle e-readers, including one costing just $79. Many other companies, including South Korea’s Samsung, Canada’s Research in Motion (the maker of BlackBerry phones) and America’s Hewlett-Packard, have tried and failed to dislodge Apple. Although the company’s share of the overall tablet market has shrunk somewhat, it is still huge. Gartner, a research firm, reckons that Apple will account for nearly three-quarters of the 64m tablets that it estimates will be sold this year. But if there is one company that can cause the denizens of Apple’s headquarters to lose some sleep at night it is undoubtedly Amazon. Admittedly, the Kindle Fire, which will be available in America in mid-November, has some handicaps. The device does not offer mobile connectivity, only a Wi-Fi link. Nor does it have a built-in camera or microphone for things such as video-chatting. And its screen is smaller than that of the iPad, though the quality of its graphic display is impressive. Amazon will no doubt roll out new versions in due course that rectify the Fire’s shortcomings and make further improvements to it. (The first iPad, launched last year, also lacked a camera.) In the meantime, the new device has plenty of things in its favour. One is its price, which is way below that of the cheapest iPad, a Wi-Fi-only model that costs $499. Another advantage is that it will be aggressively promoted on Amazon.com, the online mall, which has a vast audience and has acted as a highly effective launch pad for the firm’s e-readers. Amazon has also developed an app store for the device, which runs on a highly customised version of Google’s Android operating system. That means popular apps such as "Angry Birds" will run on the device. Perhaps the Fire’s biggest advantage is access to Amazon's oodles of digital content, including over 100,000 movies and TV shows, over 17m songs and more than 1m e-books, all held in Amazon’s computing “cloud”. This cloud will also be helpful in other respects. The Fire has just eight gigabytes of memory (which helps keep down costs) because Amazon is assuming that people will keep most of their stuff in its free cloud service. And the Fire will take advantage of a novel technology called Amazon Silk, which uses the power of Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure to help make web-browsing faster, by reducing the amount of processing that needs to be done on the device itself. None of this makes the Fire a sure-fire success. But it does make it a credible pretender to the iPad’s throne.