There's some new Amazon Kindle Fire news today. Kindle Fire owners should be happy with a new update and investors will be happy with the expected profit from Kindle Fire sales.
The survey shows that he Kindle Fire is not an iPad replacement but primarily used as and eReader. However, there are reports that Amazon has reduced its manufacturing orders in China due to the looming next generation iPad launch.
Survey Shows Profit
Ross Sandler at RBC Capital surveyed Kindle Fire owners. He analysed profit areas for Amazon and found that people who bought the Fire primarily use it for reading ebooks, then browsing and gaming.
Amazon's title of the most gifted item of 2011 was correct nearly half of the respondents received the Kindle Fire as a gift
Sandler predicts that customers will buy five books per quarter equating $15 in ebook revenue per quarter. Calculating three apps per purchase per quarter, it equates to $9 in paid app revenue per Kindle Fire unit per quarter. When he was done calculating he assigned a cumulative lifetime operating income of $136 per Kindle Fire sold.
RBC Found:
- What was the most important reason for buying the Kindle Fire? 47% said it was a gift. 27% cited features. 20% cited the price.
- Over 80% of Fire owners have purchased an e-book, and 58% had purchased more than three e-books within 15-60 days of buying the Fire.
- The two most frequent users for the Fire were ebook reading, at 71%, and browsing the web, at 39%. Playing game was cited by 29%, and using apps, 20%. Only 13% named streaming video as a most frequent activity.
- 66% of the survey group had purchased at least one app; 41% have purchased three or more. He assumes 3 apps per purchase per quarter, suggesting $9 in paid app revenue per Kindle Fire unit per quarter at above-company average operating margin.
- 72% of the sample had not used the Fire to buy physical goods on Amazon.com. Of the 26% who had, a third said the purchases were incremental to what they would have purchased on the site otherwise. 51% increased their physical purchases on Amazon “slightly to significantly” because of owning the Kindle Fire.
Amazon has released update 6.2.2 for the Kindle Fire. The update enhances fluidity and performance. It offers better support to manually set up email accounts in the Email app and a new mode for full-screen web viewing. The most important changes are that you'll have to enable Flash and encryption the Silk browser if you want to use them.
This update contains several performance improvements and additional features:
- Improvements to the graphics system. There is smoother rendering when performing common operations like pinching and zooming, panning and scrolling.
- There is a new icon (four arrows pointing outward) in the lower right corner of the screen Tapping on this icon enables a full screen mode that maximizes the amount of the screen devoted to the web site. To exit full screen mode, tap on the up arrow at the bottom center of the display.
- It's easier to turn Flash on and off. The "Enable plug-ins" setting in the browser settings has been changed to "Enable Flash." The Flash default is "Off" but if you'd like Flash to be turned on, go to Silk settings and select "Enable Flash."
- The Silk Browser is faster without SSL. To reduce overhead and speed up page loads, they have changed the communication process and will no longer use SSL by default. If you want to enable SSL for the communication between the Kindle Fire and the Silk acceleration servers, you can select the "Optional Encryption" setting in the browser settings menu. This change does not affect traffic to SSL (HTTPS) web sites; that traffic is routed directly to the those web sites and remains encrypted.
To update your Kindle Fire make sure you are connected to a Wi-Fi network and that your battery is fully charged. Tap the Quick Settings icon in the upper right corner of the Fire, then tap "Sync." The software update will automatically download in the background and will be applied once the download is complete while the tablet is asleep.
You can also download the update to your computer and then transfer the update to Kindle Fire via a USB cable.
Orders Cut from Manufacturers
DigiTimes reported that Kindle Fire orders with original manufacturers are expected to be 3 million units this quarter which is half of the 6 million units Amazon reportedly shipped during the holiday quarter of 2011. These facts compounded with rumors that Apple would reduce the price of the iPad 2, when the iPad 3 comes lead Apple Insider to conclude that the Kindle Fire order reduction was due to iPad competition.
The Kindle Fire did eat out some iPad sales. Morgan Keegan lowered its shipment estimates for iPad in the December quarter from 16 million to 13 million due to Kindle Fire sales.
The Kindle Fire was hottest selling and most-wished-for item on Amazon and named the most-gifted-promoted tablet by Wireless and Mobile News. Kindle Fire sales are predicted to beat all other tablets in 2012.
The Kindle Fire was under fire for a less than optimal user experience as well as preloaded 1-click buying that could let kids buy lots of items on Amazon.com easily.
The best features of the Kindle Fire are the dual-core processor, free Amazon Cloud storage, cloud accelerated mobile browser and of course the $199 price. Previously reviewed shortcomings of the Kindle Fire include it uses Android 2.3(not a tablet OS) and lacks Bluetooth, cellular data, a camera and GPS. The Kindle Fire touchscreen is only 7 inches..