New Adventures in Software by Dan Dyer

As expected, Amazon today launched the Kindle Fire, its own Android-powered 7-inch tablet (available to pre-order ahead of a November 15th release). At just $199 the device is even more aggressively priced than the $250 mooted by TechCrunch a few weeks ago. It’s clear that Amazon’s strategy is not to make lots of money selling the hardware but to use it to sell more e-books, MP3s, apps, films and other digital content. It’s this that makes it significant for Android developers – if things play out how Amazon intends, we should see a big increase in sales on the Amazon Appstore.

It’s striking how Amazon has completely down-played the Android underpinnings of its new machine. The word “Android” appears only once on the product page and only then as part of the name “Amazon Appstore for Android”. The Kindle Fire doesn’t look much like an Android device either. This is not a Google-endorsed, Honeycomb-powered tablet. In fact, according to TechCrunch, it runs a fork of Froyo (Android 2.2). Inevitably this adds to Android fragmentation concerns. It remains to be seen whether Amazon will release an emulator image to enable developers to test for this environment.

For now the Kindle Fire is disappointingly but unsurprisingly a US-only proposition. A wider launch of the Amazon Appstore could be imminent and it seems reasonable to expect that the Kindle Fire might follow sometime in 2012.

In my previous post, I concluded that Amazon’s Appstore for Android was an underwhelming proposition for developers and would probably remain so, at least until Amazon’s mooted Android tablets surfaced. Details of a Kindle-branded 7″ Android tablet have now started to appear, with M.G. Siegler on TechCrunch claiming to have actually used the device. Based on his report, it seems Amazon intends to diverge further from Google’s template than any major Android device manufacturer has done so far (Mark Murphy ponders what this means for developers).

Perhaps the most significant detail is the rumoured price point. At $250 (~£154) it will be half the price of an iPad. This thing is likely to sell. And when it sells, app sales should follow.

I suspect the device will initially be available in the US only as this is Amazon’s usual strategy when launching new products and services, and the Appstore itself is US-only at present.

Here’s hoping that, to ensure app compatibility, Amazon decides to send free development devices to those loyal Android developers who have been with its Appstore since launch.