Amazon jumped headlong into the tablet wars this week with their new Kindle Fire tablet. The tablet is a 7″ touchscreen tablet with a striking resemblance to the Blackberry Playbook (with good reason). The Fire runs Amazon’s custom flavour of Google’s Android operating system, so thoroughly customized that it’s almost unrecognizable. Amazon has charged headlong into the tablet wars, and their opening shot is an impressive one. All kinds of tablet goodness, all for the low, low price of $199.

Is This the (An)droid you’re looking For?

Google’s strategy for Android has seemed to be: give it away for free, but get people to do what you want by creating value-addons that make or break the tablet experience. GMail, Google Maps, and especially Google Market. Android-based tablets have had a hard time succeeding without those key differentiators, and Google has weilded a heavy stick in terms of who has access. Amazon has managed to get around Google’s restrictions through a slick little manouver called doing it themselves. While most companies couldn’t create a credible alternative to the Android Market, an online retailing giant like Amazon is in the best postition to make it work. And with lots of apps on sale for the Fire, one of the biggest obstacles to the tablet’s success has been removed. In the meantime, Google’s Android strategy is starting to show some cracks, as Amazon isn’t alone in using Google’s work against them.

Spider’s Silk

One of Amazon’s key innovations for the Fire is a cloud-based browser called Amazon Silk. Silk pre-fetches websites using Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, and pushes streamlined versions of called sites to the Fire. This isn’t new, or revolutionary techonolgy, but if the Fire sells in any quantity (and I think it will) then Amazon will have a LOT of quality data on their users’s browsing habits to use in ways Google dreams about at night.

The 800 Pound Gorilla

The first thing on everyone’s mind after the announcement is of course, how will this do against the iPad? Will the Kindle Fire disrupt the iPad market? Some columnists on this site don’t think so, and neither does Horace Dediu. I think that Amazon will likely sell a lot of these, and some of those sales might be to people who would otherwise have bought iPads, but the two devices target different markets. The iPad is a simple, elegant computer replacement, that is likely going to get more and more capable over time. The Kindle Fire is what many people thought the original iPad was, an extremely effective way to consume all kinds of content, but from Amazon, in 60 seconds or less. Many people will get both, and this may compete more with the iPod Touch, than the iPad in the end.

Wrap Up

Amazon is now a player in the tablet market. They have a low-cost contender that is priced in prime Christmas-gift, impulse-purchase territory. Will it disrupt the iPad? Probably not, but they’ve fired a clear shot in the direction of Android, and may do more to change Google’s strategy than Apples.