Amazon, RIM tablets look alike--that's where it ends

By: Brooke Crothers October 1, 2011 12:16 PM PDT

The Kindle Fire looks strikingly like the poor-selling liquidation-prone tablet from RIM. But that won't stop the Fire from flying out of Amazon's warehouses. Here's why.

Amazon Kindle Fire. Hmm...looks kinda like a BlackBerry Playbook. But that's where the similarity ends.

(Credit: Amazon)

Analysts I talked to this week have a common forecast. Amazon will sell millions of the Kindle Fire tablet soon after it becomes available on November 15. Easily beating other Android tablet rivals in sales volume. And crushing its doppelganger, RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook.

In fact, the only thing possibly holding back Amazon from selling 4 million tablets (the high end of analysts' forecasts) in the months after it becomes available is component supply bottlenecks. That's exactly the same kind benign problem that Apple has and other Android players--and RIM--wish they had.

"It's...not a demand constraint. Amazon is supply constrained near-term due to low yields on touch screens," Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar said in a phone interview Friday.

The $199 price, of course, is a big factor driving these expectations. "At that price point there's almost an insatiable demand. HP's TouchPad proves that," Kumar said.

But consumers won't be buying the hardware--which is the another factor that sets it apart from competitors. Right out of the box, you get Amazon's content library of millions of movies, TV shows, magazines, and books. CEO Jeff Bezos is claiming about 10,000 apps in its Android app store.

"The Kindle Fire is what people imagined a tablet could be. Others have been stuck on the idea that the tablet is a hardware device. What we're learning from the Kindle Fire is it's not a hardware device. It's a software and experience (content) device," said Richard Shim, an analyst at DisplaySearch.

Then there's the distribution differentiator. "Amazon doesn't need retail stores. That allows them to be very aggressive on the price," Shim said. "If they had to go through retailers like the Android crowd they couldn't be more aggressive on the price."

All points that have been lost on players like RIM. Ironically, the PlayBook and Kindle Fire are strikingly alike. To the untrained eye, it's hard to tell them apart. They're both the same size (7 inches), use similar materials, are approximately the same thickness, and pack the same Texas Instruments dual-core processor. And they're both made by the same manufacturer: Quanta.

Funny how could two tablets so alike can be so different.

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