singlestick
iPF Noob
Though Apple needs to pay attention, they are shipping 200,000 units a day. A Day. It's a pretty solid market position with huge momentum.
If Amazon sells 1m new tablets in the quarter I would consider that a huge success.
That's 5 days production on the iPad...
RIM only sold 500,000 Playbooks in a year, and HP had to dump their tablet at a huge loss after only selling 20,000....
Amazon will have a hard time making hay here unless they really decide to lose money to try to get market share. Another $500 entry level book-reader tablet is not going to appeal to any large market segment - newly defined or otherwise.
-t
RIM and HP were selling tablet devices. Amazon may (we are still speculating here) be selling a portable purchase platform. Big difference. Even if Amazon sells their tablet at $250, they would not be deciding to lose money to get market share. People buy stuff from Amazon. Lots of stuff. A tablet would be another purchase point.
By the way, this is a different model from Apple's model of the iPad as a device that lets you do cool stuff.
And again, there are a lot of people who don't have tablets, and people who do not have smart phones or the latest computers. And there are people who may just want a super ebook reader with extra features. There is not a small or monolithic market. Lots of room for everybody. So again, while Apple may not have to worry, they, and everybody else, needs to pay attention to successes and failures. If Amazon comes out with a good product, things could get very interesting for all the other players.
As an aside, momentum doesn't mean much, either for software or hardware. Not too long ago, everyone was on MySpace in between using their Blackberries. Today, not so much.