24
2011
Kindle Fire Retailing Just Above Build Cost
An article by admin
Experts have found that the new Amazon Kindle Fire costs the e-commerce giant $201.70 to produce, which is less than $3 above the retail price of $199. Analysts how ever expected that Amazon would be taking a much larger loss on the device, simply to allow them the ability to compete directly with other tablets such as the iPad 2, which has a much higher starting price of $499 – or the Nook Tablet, pricing in at $249. The company is hoping to make up the loss through the selling of products and applications pitched through the device. Hardware required to make the device is costing $185.60, while manufacturing costs another $16.10. Ultimately it’s believed that the display and touchscreen are responsible for the biggest costs in creating the Kindle Fire – then factor in memory, processor, wireless radio and other various features.
The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s tablet version of the Kindle e-book reader and runs on Google’s Android operating system. The build of the Kindle Fire came up short according to some analysts, shipping with less ram than initially expected. It was assumed that the Kindle Fire would feature a whopping 8GB of DDR2 DRAM memory, but it only arrived with 4GB. It has a 1GHz dual-core processor, with 8 GB internal storage, which is estimated to be enough for about 80 applications, plus 10 movies or 800 songs or even 6,000 books. The device features a cloud-accelerated “split browser” called Amazon Silk. This browser allows off-device cloud computation as well as fast webpage content transmission, such as rendering a webpage’s layout. There is also a built-in email application which allows various webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL Mail, Hotmail etc, to arrive at a single inbox.
