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Amazon Kindle Fire 2 to be built by Foxconn, will ship during the summer

Categories: Android
By: , IntoMobile
Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 1:33 AM
kindle-fire-update

Amazon’s highly successful $200 tablet, the Kindle Fire, is set to get a successor sometime this summer. We don’t know much about it, and some are speculating that it’ll have a 10 inch screen, but one thing we can now confirm is that it’ll be made by Foxconn. This is important for two key reasons. First, it isn’t a coincidence that the Kindle Fire looks like a BlackBerry Playbook. Amazon basically rushed the Kindle Fire out to market, so they went with an off the shelf design that was already being built by the folks at Quanta. Second, why do you think the Amazon Kindle Fire is only on sale in the United States? Amazon (read: Quanta) can’t make enough of them, and Amazon wants to wait until they can build a better product, which is where Foxconn comes in. Their factories have enough capacity and the required tooling to ship a next generation Kindle to not just the United States, but also key European and Asian markets.

So besides size, and hopefully design, where else does Amazon compete? The obvious answer is the right answer: price. We don’t know what Apple plans to do with the pricing of the iPad 2 once they introduce the iPad 3 next month, but that’ll surely be an indicator of where Amazon wants to go with the Kindle Fire 2 price tag. Also, we don’t know how much cheaper the first generation Kindle will be this summer. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to imagine the first gen Fire hitting $179 and then have the second gen coming in at $279. Again, all of this depends on how Apple changes iPad pricing.

Should you be excited? Well duh, of course you should, Amazon’s business model isn’t to rape your wallet and pocket a 40% margin on hardware. That’s what Apple does. Amazon’s all about making you buy stuff from their store. They practically sell the Fire at a loss just to make you one of their customers.

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • Anonymous

    If it hasn’t got a higher res screen, it’s a fail.
     

  • http://twitter.com/Wolverineks wolverine

    that’s too bad, i thought the Quanta design was the best part about it

  • http://www.fire2.net/ Fire2

    I think we are likely to see a $299 price tag attached to the new kindle fire 2, it’s still super competitive and with the beefed up specs that the fire 2 will sport I see no reason why Amazon doesn’t try and make a few bucks this time around.

  • http://www.techendeavour.com/Mobile_Application_Development Mobile application development

    Though the tablet runs on an Android platform, its app is not available on android market. As for the Unique Selling Point for Kindle fire goes it is the Amazon’s Silk
    browser. Silk is designed for faster browsing capabilities and the Kindle fire
    just supports that.

  • http://www.drm-removal-tool.com/tutorials/itunes-to-kindle-fire.html itunes to kindle fire

    I would like to be taller, younger and thinner and richer for next one