I disagree with you about Bezos.

If anything Bezos' strategy is sheer genius.

Amazon are not in the market to sell eBook readers. They are in the market to sell books. Put another way the Kindle is a device to enable Amazon to sell more books and newspapers.

On top of that, a Kindle is not a mere ebook reader. All kindles have inbuilt wifi. Amazon will PAY for you to access the Amazon store for free. You can buy books and have them downloaded to your kindle. And here comes the genius part -- you can read these books from ANY device associated with your account using custom Amazon applications. There is one for the PC , one upcoming from the Mac AND ONE FOR THE iPHONE. 

You can buy & read  Kindle books with anything, including an iPad. This means that Amazon will be happier the more successful the iPad is because they will sell more books. Sure, they won't ship as many kindles but the money is in the books, not the device.

BTW the cheapest iPad is just under 400$

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Philip Musyoki <pmusyoki@gmail.com> wrote:

I think I just love the iPad.

It has the portability that Netbook or even the smallest of laptops work, and the simplicity of a phone. The ability to run iWorks is a big boost, you can actually use it as a laptop replacement. Edit documents on the go, do presentations. I am not sure if it has a port for connecting to a projector, but if it has, soon you will see Michael Joseph ditch his Lenovo and start announcing Safaricom's results directly from the iPad.

I have never been a fan of these Netbooks, as Steve Jobs says, they are good at nothing.

I think the iPhone like OS it is based on is very lightweight, so it will be faster, and somehow takes the thunder out of Google’s Chrome OS. It is also elegant, I think when it comes to aesthetics no one beats Apple.

And then you can watch HT Movies on it.

The people to be worried by the iPad are the likes of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, I can see how it will be tough for him to market the Kindle which is just an eBook reader while the iPad is much more than that. I bet you will want an eBook reader that can also play movies and where you can do your email and word-processing. Other threatened companies are the like of eePC and Asus. Their Netbook segment is now under threat.

But I think the iPad will be expensive. Could be anything from USD 800 to USD 100. Guess it is hard to compete with a USD 200 Acer or Asus Netbook.

But let's wait and see.

.

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