April 3, 2010 will mark the beginning of the end for Amazon’s great hardware experiment — the Kindle. Faced with inexpensive, multipurpose tablets such as the iPad, which will be able to consume content from multiple sources including Amazon itself, consumer interest in the Kindle will fade into oblivion.
Kindlenomics, the model for cost justification for owning one of these devices just got blown out of the water by the iPad.
The first casualty in the Great e-Reader Purge of 2010 will be Amazon’s 10.4″ (9.7″ viewable) Kindle DX, which at a $489.00 price point is a non-starter when it is only $10 cheaper than the entry-level 16GB iPad that features approximately four times the storage capacity and a brilliant color 9.7″ IPS (In-Plane Switching LCD using LED backlight) touch screen.
As a content consumption device, the iPad has a display with a much faster refresh rate, a much faster processor and has access to over 150,000 applications over ubiquitous high-speed Wi-Fi, including the free Kindle for Tablets app that will provide all of the functionality of the inferior, dedicated black & white e-reader, and then some, because it will be able to read Kindle books in color, as shown in a screen shot of the application below.
Why buy a Kindle DX that is limited to reading and buying books from Amazon, when you can get an iPad for 10 dollars more that reads content for Kindle, Barnes & Noble eBooks, Apple’s own iBooks, Lexcycle Stanza, and brilliant full-color magazines from Zinio? Not to mention read blogs and websites for free that Amazon otherwise charges for to convert to its proprietary format?
In an initial defensive move, Amazon will certainly try to sell off the the existing inventory by dropping the cost of the DX unit down to $400.00, or possibly even as low as $359.00 but nobody in their right mind will pay $400.00 let alone $359.00 for the large form factor version which is essentially a one-trick pony. The DX is not long for this world, and Amazon knows it.
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