Amazon, according to the latest rumor, is gunning for a low-cost touch screen panel. This means a panel that only supports two-finger multitouch, TechCrunch writes, compared to the 10-finger technology underpinning the iPad and Honeycomb. The report, if it’s true, Tech Crunch says, shows that Amazon is planning to do the smart thing and compete with the iPad on price and not try to convince consumers it is an iPad clone.
Such reasoning is spot on, if a survey by from Retrevo is at all telling: It finds that half (48%) of US online consumers say that low price is the most important feature in the next tablet computer they buy, making low price 71% more popular than the number two-ranked feature, high resolution display (28%). In addition, low price is 140% more popular than the number three feature, better input features (20%).
Also, while half of survey respondents who plan to purchase a tablet computer say they intend to buy an iPad, the Amazon tablet was also a favorite.
Apple’s New In-App Rule
Another factor that could nudge consumers in Amazon’s direction is Apple’s enforcement of its in-app content policy, announced earlier this year and then tweaked in June. The upshot of the back-and-forth is that apps must get rid of any purchase links to a site’s content, unless it is willing to share 30% of the proceeds with Apple. Not surprisingly, content providers have been removing their links en masse, Amazon among them.
When announcing this, though, Amazon also slipped in the fact that Kindle app now supports more than 100 Kindle newspapers and magazines including the Economist. This is an important development, Wired writes, as it gives "publishers a much better reason to partner with Amazon in addition to or rather than Apple for periodical sales. Periodicals used to be completely absent from Kindle’s iOS apps. I’m sure that wasn’t Amazon's decision - publishers didn’t need Amazon to easily get their content on the iPad."
And in addition, it concluded, if customers start using the Kindle iPad app to read their magazines and newspapers they will continue to do so with the Amazon tablet too.
