The analyst of technology securities at Nomura International, Richard Windsor, says that companies which manufacture Android based tablets should try to strike a partnership with Amazon rather than with Google if they want to avoid a possible exit from the global tablet market at the hands of the Apple iPad and the internet retailer’s Kindle Fire.
The announcement of the 7 inch Kindle Fire by Amazon has sparked expectations that it will consolidate the position of the market for low-priced tablets along with challenging Apple’s dominance in the market as has never been done before.
However, despite basing the new tablet on Android, Amazon hasn’t exactly used a version of the platform authenticated by Google, since the OS which runs on the Fire is a new deviant of Android which has been developed by Amazon itself, doing away with most of the Google services which are usually shipped with the normal versions of Android.
In a note which was released this Tuesday, Windsor stated that the biggest effect of the upheaval triggered by the Kindle Fire’s release will likely be a big change in the roadmap of cheaper devices and also many possible partnerships with Amazon itself. He added that the launch of the Amazon device has left most Android tablet manufacturers in an impossible position as they are now left offering very expensive products which do not offer comparable content and services.
However, if the current Android manufacturers were to start going towards Amazon, it will deal a big blow to Google’s strategy for getting its services as widely available in the market as possible. Apart from that, even as the Kindle Fire uses Google as its default search engine, many experts are of the opinion that Google had to pay to get that place, unlike other Android based tablets where it gets the default search engine status by default.
According to Windsor, it is very possible that tablet manufacturers will start shifting to Amazon in order to offer the retailer’s experience on their own devices; however, till then they have resolved that they will not decrease the pricing of their tablets. Among the manufacturers which won’t be cutting down prices is Asustek, which has announced that the price of its Eee Pad Transformer will remain at $499, which is the same as the lowest priced iPad’s cost.
