With Amazon’s Kindle Fire lighting up excitement for Android tablets in a way no other product has been able to so far, there are questions about whether or not it could do the same for an Android phone.
Harry McCracken at Time.com has an enlightening article about why it would make sense to have a “Kindle Fire Smartphone.”
McCracken asks why no one has built the iPhone equivalent of an Android phone – one that can capture an enormous market share that’s nearly unparalleled in the industry.
“Most important, Amazon has already done a lot of the heavy lifting required to build a phone. It could simply repurpose much of the effort it’s poured into the Kindle Fire tablet, and then add phone-specific features,” he opines.
The Kindle Fire has so many positive factors working in its favor. First, at $199, it’s cheap. It blows other offerings like the Xoom and Galaxy Tab out of the water.
Second, “Kindle” is an immensely recognizable brand and carries a lot of weight throughout the industry – again, something that names like “Xoom” don’t have.
And of course, because it’s Amazon, the Kindle Fire gets free unlimited publicity on the world’s largest online store.
It could bring a lot of those same factors to the table with a Kindle phone. The biggest issue with Android is fragmentation – you never know if an Android app will work on your particular phone. If there was a phone that was seen as “the” Android phone, though, it could be the model upon which all other Android handsets are built and help with that issue.
But this is all just hypothesis at this point. Amazon will be plenty busy with the Kindle Fire for some time to come.
