"We have seen reports that one of the major weapons Amazon wants to use against the iPad is price."
Finally someone gets that this might be a good idea.
Finally someone gets that this might be a good idea.
Really price is just one way to differentiate a product from others in the same niche. Features, specs, manufacturing quality, app ecosystem, design, brand, usability, etc. are others. Those tons of low-end cheap smartphones are at least as critical to Android becoming the most popular smartphone platform as the ones that instead compete with the iPhone by better specs.
Right now Honeycomb tablets aren't all that good at positively differentiating themselves from the iPad in any useful way. Maybe some people desperately need some particular Android feature that can't be added to iOS in any way, or really dislike Apple. Not really a solid foundation... The closest exception is probably the Eee Transformer.
The real question is whether some other manufacturer really can lower the price enough to really make it a differentiating factor.
HP and the rest don't have that advantage - they need to make money off the touchpads, and Apple can undercut them by controlling the App store and locking down supplies.
The same goes for Google-rola. Should be an interesting next couple of years for the tablet business in terms of seeing how low these non-Apple players are willing to go on hardware price in an attempt to prop up their real moneymakers (content, ads).
But they're also flocking in at least as large numbers to the cheaper Android phones. Amazon doesn't have to beat the iPad to win.