graney comments

As @pawatan, and even Bezos himself, say; It is all about the services and not the devices.

Amazon has an awesome service offering, and to take on Apples currently entrenched tablet market position, they are purposely making their devices very cheap.

This significantly lowers the barrier to entry to their awesome service offering. [People will buy the Fire for Amazons services... not because of the devices capabilities. And the $80 kindle will just swallow up the e-ink reader market.]

If the iPhone taught us anything it was that features are not the reason behind mobile technology commercial success.

When the iPhone 1 was released my Nokia phone could do video calls, install lots of bespoke apps, send emails from multiple accounts, use google maps, it could also be used in Japan, the US and the EU, and even send an SMS.

The iPhone could not; but it was still an overwhelming success because it connected to the very popular iTunes store.

It is services that make or break successful mobile device adoption and not the devices themselves.

Amazon will have a huge commercial success with the Fire.

Sony is making a bid to occupy a space that is still dominated by Amazon. But now by Amazons new $80 (¥ 6200) e-ink WiFi Kindle. [Amazon released 3 new e-ink Kindles along with the colour Kindle Fire tablet.]

How can the ¥ 20000 ($260) Sony Reader PRS-T1 even begin to compete? Even so, it is not the device that makes it popular but the service behind the device. And Amazon's kindle store beats Sony's reader store hands down.

The Kindle has supported Japanese since version 3, the previous kindle iteration.