Michael Liedtke, for the Associated Press, at the San Jose Mercury News:
“Our tablet focus is in and around content consumption,” said David Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices.
It’s a little storefront, TV, and game center. Cheap, but with ads. And some experimental marketing (a six pack of tablets?). Let’s see.
Will Amazon’s most valuable consumers be buying *this* particular $50 model. No – if they buy a Kindle, they’ll probably buy a better model. But some of tomorrow’s Prime customers (tweens and teens) just might be the ones this is aimed for. And then they’ll ask their mom, dad, grandma, or grandpa to buy this or buy that. Might be on the tablet. Or might be via the other person’s account. At least that’s the hope, I believe. If it works, it’s worth the ultra-low (if any) gross margin that this product has.
On a related front, Pocketnow believes this latest version of the Kindle UI is looking thinner (closer to stock Android) than ever before.