I wish the lazy tech press would stop looking for an Apple “killer.” There isn’t one, and there’s unlikely to be one. None of the “iPhone killers” lived up to that title — but android phones have taken the larger share of the market collectively. I’d expect much the same thing with tablets.
What Amazon did was take all of the limitations people complained about with the original iPad, steer into the skid, and drop the price point to something no one (with the exception of unusable crap) can come close to matching. Too closed, no camera, no productivity apps, too little storage, no SD slot. Add to that no Bluetooth, no GPS, no cellular option, lower (no 720p) resolution, no video output.
The critique, largely unjustified, was that the iPad was only good for consuming content. The Fire embraces that. It is much more locked in to Amazon than the iPad is to Apple, for the strategic reason that Amazon is selling the tablet at a loss and counting on content sales to turn a profit.
Is this a successful strategy? Probably. It might make a bit of a dent in iPad sales numbers, but it’s fundamentally aiming at a different audience. Its (now hopelessly outclassed) competitors are the Nook Color, other e-readers, and — bear with me on this — those portable clamshell DVD players. This would be a killer device for entertaining kids in the back seat, and if you’re buying Amazon movies instead of DVDs, you can have your whole movie collection with you on vacation. Just pull into a truck stop with WiFi, and you can download another half-dozen movies and get back on the road.
You're overlooking something. The Kindle Fire has only 8GB of storage! There isn't room for OS, apps, music, books, games, and your whole movie collection. There's barely room for ONE DVD at 4.3 GB if you're carrying much of anything else. Any movies would have to be really low Rez and highly compressed. . . Or streaming, so not much content on the road... Sorry.