$99 Amazon Kindle Fire HD coming this year
By Vlad Bobleanta on 20 Mar 13Amazon is reportedly working on its cheapest Kindle tablet yet. A $99 Kindle Fire HD variation could be released this year. It will be a 7-inch tablet, and it will come with a TI processor (just like all the other Kindle tablets) and its screen will have 1,280×800 resolution. So technically the HD moniker will be truthful.
Today, the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD retails for $199, which is exactly the price of the Asus-made Google Nexus 7, one of its main competitors. There’s a cheaper Kindle tablet, though. At $159 you can get an older, non-HD, second generation Kindle Fire. But halving the price of the 7″ Kindle Fire HD would definitely go a long way in imposing Amazon as a leading tablet vendor. After all, there aren’t many (or any?) brand-name Android tablets below the $200 mark. Under $100, though, we can find myriads of unheard of tablets that come with no software support whatsoever, so Amazon could try and dominate that market too.
Amazon isn’t interested in making money off of hardware, that much was admitted by Jeff Bezos himself. The hardware is just a way to get people hooked into the company’s wide-reaching content ecosystem. So with component prices going down continually, perhaps in a few months a $99 tablet from Amazon could become reality.
For now though Amazon is denying this. Or at least it’s denying that it’s planning on cutting the price of the existing Kindle Fire HD with a 7-inch screen down to $99. That doesn’t include the possibility of releasing a device with slightly different innards for that incredibly low price.
So while this is a rumor for now, the key takeaway here is that such a $99 Kindle tablet is within the realm of possibility, if not for this year, then certainly for 2014.
Via TechCrunch
If you liked the post, you might find these interesting too:
- Amazon Kindle Fire 2 coming in the second half of the year alongside new 10-inch model
- Amazon taps Foxconn to make Kindle Fire 2. Should start shipping it in May/June
- 8.9 inch Amazon Kindle Fire with Full HD resolution to join other two new 7 inch models?
- Amazon’s Kindle Fire may be headed to the UK in January
- Amazon Kindle Fire could be dropped to $149 when HD Kindle Fire 2 launches in Q3, rumor says
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