Martin. rowling. kipling. marks. tolkien. sebold. scott fitzgerald. hosseini. collins. martel.
digitized
We all knew it would happen at some point; the miraculous Amazon smartphone has finally arrived! But is it set to go up or down in flames?
Last week the Amazon ‘Fire Phone’ was released into the UK’s android-mosphere to a mix of reviews. Personally I didn’t even realise it was being developed, and when I asked my friends they were equally surprised. I guess it all makes sense for Amazon to scale down to pocket size devices; an interesting opposite as Apple just released their own growing breed of plus size models like the iPhone 6+. But Amazon is just a giant, digital shopping mall, what do they get out of this development? In a recent lecture (Timbrell, N. 2014), I was shown some figures as to what means (devices etc) people like to read books on. This Mintel report said that 24% of consumers read via e-reader and only 7% via smartphone proving that this new addition to their hardware collection is no follow on from their Kindle products and is intended for a new purpose - but what is it? If you look at the features, everything that it does seems to direct the user to the Amazon site. Looking at the review from ‘The Verve’ on YouTube, Pierce states that the smartphone simply doesn’t cut it when it comes to being an actual phone: ‘The only thing consistently straight forward about the Fire Phone is how easy it is to get things from Amazon’ (Pierce, D. 2014). So what are Amazon playing at? On this new phone you can buy anything from T-shirts to the latest up-and-coming rock album to their concert tickets by simply flashing your phone at a poster. At this rate they are going to completely eliminate all other industries - not just the book trade which suffers blow after blow due to their super cheap pricing strategies. When the e-reader was being developed, Amazon already had an advantage over the market in the sense that they already had customers who regularly bought their books (Hall, F. 2013). This created a perfect opportunity for them to develop the Kindle which could ‘connect effortlessly to their storefront’ (Hall, F. 2013) allowing customers to search, purchase, download and read any book they wanted in a matter of minutes. With the Fire phone it seems to me that they are following a similar pattern covering products which is not limited to one market. By releasing a phone they can attract attention ‘effortlessly’ and boost their sales so much so that one day they could, possibly, monopolise all markets. As stated in an interview with Jeff Bezos in 2012, ‘we sell the hardware at our cost’ as they are able to make back profit through the sales of their ebooks. Is this the same with the Fire phone? In my local O2 store it is priced at £399 compared with the new Apple iPhone 6 priced at £629. Business Insider reminds us that the phone boasts ’32 gigabytes instead of 16’, making up for the high price tag, but does it really matter when all you are really buying is a ‘phone’ that is essentially a portable, direct link to Amazon so you can buy whatever you want, wherever you want, as long as its from Amazon. Bibliography Clay, K. (2012). Amazon confirms it makes no profit on Kindles. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/10/12/amazon-confirms-it-makes-no-profit-on-kindles/- [Accessed 5th October 2014]. Eadicicco, L. (2014). Jeff Bozos: Here’s why the Amazon smartphone is so expensive. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-fire-phone-price-2014-6 [Accessed 3rd October 2014]. Hall, F. (2013). The business of digital publishing. Abingdon: Routledge. The Verge. (2014). Amazon Fire Phone review. [Online Video]. 22 July. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeQqBYX2or4. [Accessed 3rd October 2014]. Timbrell, N. (2014). Devices, formats and standards. U65025 [Online]. Oxford Brookes University. Available at: https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/491264/mod_resource/content/4/U65025Lecture22014.pdf [Accessed 3rd October 2014]. Williams, A. (2014). Amazon Fire Phone review. Available at: http://www.stuff.tv/amazon/amazon-kindle-phone/review [Accessed 3rd October 2014].
2 Comments
10/23/2014 07:29:34 pm
You mention that the whole reason Amazon have created this phone is so that customers have a platform where they can buy whatever they want 'as long as its from Amazon'. I don't disagree with this, Jeff Bezos has made it perfectly clear that he wants Amazon to grow as big as it can and eclipse the competition, no matter what the cost. But isn't this just the same as what Apple are doing? As a primarily software/hardware creator they certainly have the upper hand when it comes to creating what the markets wants out of a mobile phone, but they also only link to products where they gain a profit. For example, Apple make money on every purchase made through the app store, you read through the iBook store and your music is played through iTunes. Therefore, when considering what other multimedia companies are also doing, do you really think this is strange? Or perhaps there is something else that makes Amazon's business model something to keep an eye on? Maybe with some tweaking of the Fire phones design, customers can have a great phone that literally does everything they want, with no more need for more than one device?
Kirsten Cozens
11/22/2014 12:51:35 am
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