The Amazon Kindle Fire can now be purchased with $30 coupons (local deal), which represent a 15% discount over the full $199 price of the device. This is not really a fire sale, but from what analyst firm IDC is reporting, the shipments of the Kindle Fire went from 4.8M to 0.7M from Q4 2011 to Q1 2012. This means that the Kindle Fire may need a boost.
Of course, a slowdown from Q4 to Q1 is rather normal to some extent, but given that Google is going to come up with a Tegra 3 powered device, called Nexus 7, for just about the same $199 price, Amazon will clearly have to adapt its pricing. Granted, the Kindle user interface may appear a bit simpler than a generic Android device, but getting a much more powerful device for the same price seems just too tempting for many.
Fortunately for Amazon, the company doesn’t want to make money from the hardware sales, and will probably be able to cut pricing further when the time comes. Amazon is most definitely not in panic mode, and stands to gain from competing hardware sales because customers from all platforms use its services. Don’t you love it when competition drives the prices down?
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