Amazon's tablet wasn't intended to be an iPad killer: it's a shopping tool

On Wednesday, Amazon presented three new models of the Kindle e-reader (in its own words, the most successful on the market) and a new Kindle Fire tablet worth $200. Introducing each new product, the head of the company, Jeff Bezos, briefly described its technical characteristics, named the price and optimistically added: “We will sell many millions of them.”

Amazon can be trusted in this case: they have already sold several million Kindle e-books, and the new models are significantly cheaper than the old ones (the cheapest is $79, versus $114 in the previous model range). Success is also predicted for the tablet, which costs 2.5 times less than the iPad and is half the price of comparable devices running Android OS (which it itself runs on). But as successful as the Kindle Fire is, it's not meant to be an iPad killer, or a killer of anything else. He has much more ambitious goals.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates that the Kindle Fire is selling for $50 less than cost. Previous Kindle models also reputedly cost more than consumers paid for them. This alone is enough to understand that the tablet computer market is not of great interest to Amazon. The company remains true to itself and plans to make money on what it can do - electronic retail. The Kindle Fire is not a tablet or a reading device. This store is—and if all goes according to Bezos' plan—the most convenient store in the world.

The original Kindle is actually a store, only a bookstore. Theoretically, it has both an Internet connection and a browser, but it is made so inconveniently that no one will use it except in conditions of extreme need. But Kindle allows you to buy and download books anywhere in the world with an ease that the Library of Congress could not boast of. It'll be the same with the Fire: shopping will almost certainly be the tablet's simplest, best-executed, and most enjoyable function.

For the Fire, Amazon wrote its own operating system on top of the original Android, and the actual shopping site figures prominently in it. In addition, along with the tablet, early buyers will receive a free month of Amazon Prime, a premium program that includes free one-day delivery on purchases. A month ago, Amazon began testing a new website design optimized for tablets, no doubt in preparation for the launch of the Kindle Fire. A browser created specifically for a tablet compresses sites on the servers of Amazon (a major provider of remote computing services), transmits them to the device in a lightweight form, and can also predict which link a person is most likely to click on, using accumulated statistics. The optimized site will, without a doubt, be stored on servers in an already ideal form, and the prediction system will allow Amazon to very effectively use its hint system - a powerful driver of sales on the site.

The Kindle Fire may have a lot going for it, allowing you to listen to music, watch movies, play games and surf the Internet, but one thing is certain: Amazon.com will fly on it.

Fire owners will have the perfect store at their disposal. A store where you can buy almost anything (in England, for example, Amazon even sells greens). A store where you can make purchases without leaving your couch - with “one click” (a registered trademark of Amazon in the US), and soon with just voice commands. A store that tells itself what the consumer needs, and then delivers the purchased goods directly to the porch for free within 24 hours. Not only do customers not have to make a shopping list or travel to the store, they don't even have to think about what they want.

For the couch store Jeff Bezos wants to build to work, he will indeed have to sell many millions of devices. But if successful, Amazon expects rapid sales growth. The Kindle reader experience has shown that people are willing to buy much more if it comes naturally. You won't regret $50 per tablet for this.

Kindle Fire: Shop on the Couch