Seattle – Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN has launched a revamped version of the Fire HD 8 Android tablet, and it’s aiming towards a reading target. With easy-to-read features, this new tablet is now available for pre-order.
Amazon’s Fire HD 8 Reader’s Edition, a bundle that includes the Fire HD 8 Android tablet, a year’s subscription to Kindle Unlimited, and a limited edition leather cover, is now available for $249.99 and up for pre-order to start shipping on December 8.
The Reader’s Edition of the Fire HD 8 serves up a year’s access to its Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service, which usually costs $10 a month. The profitable feature seems to be the access to over one million e-books and thousands of audiobooks.
The new tablet features the new “Blue Shade” trait which Amazon announced last week. The setting improves reading conditions in dark or dimly lit environments by dimming the brightness and changing the color temperature of the screen away from blue, which is known to impair sleeping. The feature also saves up battery life up to 25 percent.
Although it’s certainly a useful feature, Blue Shade is already available for other Amazon Fire tablets. Additionally, Amazon is focusing its marketing strategy in not only on Blue Shade, but also on its Bookerly font, which is designed to improve reading on digital screens, and Word Runner, which focuses on one word at a time to make it easier to read. This feature is also included in other tablets.
The company believes it still may work out beneficially for the new tablet because of its timing. With Christmas arriving in just a few days, Amazon has the chance to convince its reading target that the new tablet is just as good as, or even better than, other e-readers because it is also a proper, Internet-connected device with a color screen.
The Fire HD 8 Reader’s Edition packs an 8.0-inch IPS LCD screen with 800 x 1280 resolution, has a quad-core 1.5 GHz processor, 8 GB internal storage with microSD support up to 128 GB, and 1 GB RAM. The leather cover also doubles as a stand to put the Fire HD in landscape or portrait orientation.
Amazon is a company is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.
Source: Venture Beat