Tag Archives: kindlefire

Amazon’s Kindle Fire now the #1 Android tablet

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Data published by comScore shows that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has emerged as the dominant Android-based tablet. At the end of February, the Kindle Fire accounted for 54 percent of all Android tablets. The next most popular Android tablet product line is Samsung’s Galaxy Tab family, which dropped from 23 percent of Android tablets in December to 15 percent in February.

The success of the Fire is no surprise to those paying attention to the tablet market—as we wrote last year, there is healthy demand for a low-cost iPad alternative. Amazon can afford to offer the hardware at a lower price than its rivals because it can make up the difference in content sales. The key factors driving sales of the Fire are likely its low price point, the strength of the Kindle brand, and the breadth of the Amazon content ecosystem.

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The route to a Kindle owner’s heart goes through the wallet

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A customer satisfaction survey of Kindle Fire owners shows that while the vast majority are satisfied with their purchase, it is mainly the low price fueling their happiness. ChangeWave Research asked a sample of new Kindle Fire owners how they were enjoying their device so far; slightly more than half reported being “very satisfied,” and 59 percent said the $199 price of the Kindle Fire was what they liked best about it.

The survey asked 254 people who had recently acquired a Kindle Fire what they liked about the device, and beyond the low price, they had little to say. Thirty-one percent liked the color screen, 27 percent the ease of use, and 20 percent liked the selection of books. “Long battery life” and “screen size” were the favorite features of only 12 percent of respondents.

When asked what their least favorite part of the device was, 27 percent said they didn’t like that there were no hardware volume up and down buttons. Twenty-one percent were most displeased that the Kindle Fire has no camera, and 15 percent said that the battery life was too short.

Overall, 54 percent of the Kindle Fire owners reported being “very satisfied” with it—not quite the iPad’s 74 percent of customers who report being “very satisfied,” but better than the 49 percent figure for other tablet devices. Combined with the 38 percent “somewhat satisfied” group, the Kindle Fire reached a 92 percent approval rating, according to ChangeWave.

The Kindle Fire has met with wide success in spite of lukewarm reviews, many of which cited the price as the main mitigator for its shortcomings—at least 4 million Kindle units were sold in December, the bulk of which were Kindle Fires, and the Kindle Fire shot up to a 36 percent market share of Android tablets in only three months. However, Boy Genius Report points out that the percent of people “very likely” to buy a Kindle Fire has dropped to 2 percent, down from 4 percent in December.

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Kindle Fire dwarfs other Android tablets in market share after just three months

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The Kindle Fire is crushing standard Android tablets in market share after only three months, according to data collected by Flurry Analytics. Measured in application sessions on Android from November 2011 to January 2012, the Kindle Fire went from a 3 percent market share to 36 percent, while the Samsung Galaxy Tab, a brand that has been on sale for over two years, dropped from 64 percent market share to 36 percent.

According to Amazon, over 4 million Kindle Fires were sold in the month of December despite its lukewarm reception. These sales were enough to give the device close to a third of the Android tablet market, as the shares of the Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer, and Acer Iconia Tab dropped to a collective 18 percent. The Kindle Fire made an even better showing in paid app downloads, representing 2.53 app downloads from a 5-app sample of top sellers for every one downloaded on a Galaxy Tab.

Granted, flipping the numbers in the Android tablet space doesn’t take an astronomical number of sales: for instance, Motorola shipped only 200,000 Xoom tablets in the fourth quarter. The Kindle Fire also likely owes much of its success to its $199 price, hundreds of dollars below the rest (the other tablets listed here have starting prices of $350 and higher). Flurry also attributes the Kindle Fire’s growth to Amazon’s focus on an ecosystem and content for users, an approach closer what Apple uses for the iPad, rather than focusing on hardware specs.

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Checking in on the Kindle Fire: over-the-air update not a fix-all

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Amazon released an over-the-air update for its Kindle Fire tablet on Wednesday. Meant to fix some of the device’s performance issues and add some security measures to prevent shopping sprees by unauthorized hands, we installed the update on our model. While we found some appreciable differences, the Kindle Fire still has performance problems, and the browser still leaves much to be desired.

A big focus of the update was fixing the overactive “carousel,” which displays recently-viewed items on the home screen. The carousel used to be overly sensitive to even a tiny swipe, but now a small swipe only takes you through the first two or three items. It’s a sensible change, since you’re rarely looking for your 25th- or 30th-most-recently-used item, just the first few. To skip through the bulk of the icons, you have to do a dramatic swipe across the screen. The carousel did misread our taps on the front items as swipes a couple of times, which might just be a natural consequence of shortening the swipe scope.

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