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This Christmas season, the tablet wars are heating up with the arrival of Amazon.com’s first entry into the tablet market, the Kindle Fire.  Among all of the Android tablets that have appeared to date, the Fire is the only one so far that has shown signs of giving Apple’s iPad a run for it’s money, and that’s mainly because of money itself, since Amazon’s tablet comes in at only $199.  No other Android tablet has managed to make it out the door for anything like that price so far, and Amazon has enjoyed millions of pre-orders and sales of its new tablet ahead of the holiday shopping season.  What does this mean for all of the other Android tablets floating around out there?  It all depends on what Android tablet users are going for in terms of value and use.

The Amazon tablet is powered by Android, but it’s a version that has been given a special Amazon makeover and has basically had some of its functionality hobbled.  Users of  the Fire tablet will need to be aware that they can only purchase apps through Amazon’s Android App Store, rather than the main Android App Store.  At first glance this might appear to be a major setback for the device, but you need to consider who the people are that are buying and using this tablet:  these are mostly people who are already using Amazon’s online services like Amazon Prime, the Kindle Store, the music store, and Amazon Streaming Video among others.  For these users, the Fire will be something of a value added device that will make consumption of Amazon’s services even more valuable to them.  We are also looking at a well established market of users of Amazon’s traditional Kindle e-book reader, many of whom have not yet waded into the relatively fresh waters of tablet computing.  For them, this is the best of both worlds, uniting their passion for e-books with the chance to experience using a fairly advanced tablet device for possibly the first time.

On the other hand, more advanced users who have already gotten used to the full and unguarded Android experience on their smart phones or on existing Android tablets may find the Kindle Fire a little too pedestrian for their tastes.  Their options still include tablets like the Samsung Galaxy series, available as either a 10″ or 7″ tablet, that gives them the complete range of Android apps and functionality.  And of course, Apple fans will always prefer the iPad 2, which is hard to beat, even by a stack of all the Android tablets currently available. Stay tuned for more tablet coverage.