What Amazon is thinking with its costly new e-reader
AMAZON’S Kindle Oasis, launched this week, has a US$290 (RM1,131) price tag — and, at least to me, offers some interesting cues about how the company’s hardware strategy has evolved.
Amazon justifies Oasis’ price tag by noting its high-end industrial design and the leather charging case, which doubles as an extra battery. Amazon’s product page says it should be out on Apr 27.
What the marketing indicates is that the Kindle Oasis is the device for which Amazon is finally ready to go full-on Apple: unapologetically stylish, premium and, yes, expensive.
Amazon doesn’t often go for the high end when it releases hardware. In fact, e-readers may be the only product line where the company can make a luxury play, given that it essentially dominates the space.
Other plays for the luxury market, or even the affordable luxury market, have produced mediocre results for Amazon at best (see its high-end Fire tablets that tried to go toe-to-toe with the iPad) or downright disasters (the Fire Phone). In most other product categories, Amazon has gone back to the middle of the market, or even to the lower end — think of the six-pack of Fire tablets it introduced last year — and kept to a strategy of making money off the content it sells through devices — such as movies, music and other books — rather than off the hardware itself.
The Kindle, however, has been the exception to that rule. While most of the e-readers do little more than just offer a great screen and a long battery life for reading books — the cheapest one, at US$79 (RM308), barely offers a way to surf the Web — the simple devices have proven popular. And, notably, Amazon has steadily introduced higherpriced models over time.
The Oasis tries to distinguish itself from its less expensive siblings by its metallic
What the marketing indicates is that the Kindle Oasis is the device for which Amazon is finally ready to go full-on Apple: unapologetically stylish, premium and, yes, expensive.
construction, its lightweight design and an extremely long battery life (the Oasis can go months without a charge). The display is bright. It’s also weighted so that it feels like you are holding an actual book with a spine in your hands, rather than a tablet. In other words, it should feel comfortable to hold and read for a long period.
But beyond these features, the Oasis shows perhaps more than any other piece of hardware that Amazon hasn’t quite given up on trying to be a company admired for what its devices allow us to do. — Washington Post