Here's How Amazon Could Quietly Become A Huge Tablet Player
It would be foolish not to include Amazon on the list of potentially huge players in the tablet industry. — While the company is still only selling simple Kindle e-readers, Amazon has quietly built all the tools it needs …
Context & Ripple Effects
The case Silicon Alley Insider makes is that Amazon doesn't need to announce anything to be in the tablet race: between the Kindle storefront, its retail machine, and now an Android app marketplace, it already owns the pieces competitors are still assembling. The argument lands four days after Bits reported Amazon exploring an Android-based Kindle, and the same week its Appstore opened with roughly 3,800 apps — a launch TechCrunch and other outlets picked up widely.
The competitive backdrop is real rather than theoretical: the Kindle e-reader is facing iPad 2 and a wave of Android tablets, which is why Amazon was giving the device away free in the UK through Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy UK — a confirmed signal it will trade hardware margin for customer reach.
First-order effects
- Amazon's Appstore hands Android users and developers a second storefront outside Google's own market, giving Amazon direct control of app distribution for the platform any future device would run on.
- Apple's iPad 2 and the new Android tablet makers put immediate pricing and feature pressure on the monochrome Kindle, which Amazon is defending by bundling it free through UK retailers to widen its base.
Second-order effects
- If Amazon converts its rumored Android work into a full tablet, Apple and Android OEMs face a rival that can price hardware near zero because its profit sits in media sales and retail transactions — a model none of the current tablet vendors can match without rebuilding their businesses.
- App distribution becomes a retail battleground: publishers and Android developers gain leverage by selling through two competing storefronts instead of one, pressuring Google to defend developer terms.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward tablets as loss-leading storefronts — devices valued for what they sell rather than what they cost — with Amazon structurally advantaged over hardware-first rivals if consumers accept subsidy-funded pricing.
- Whoever controls the default app and content layer on cheap Android hardware accumulates the kind of gatekeeper power regulators and platform partners eventually have to negotiate with.
The trend: Consumer tablets are shifting from standalone gadgets to subsidized content-and-commerce terminals, with Amazon positioned as the first retailer to weaponize that model against Apple and Google's hardware partners.