The Kindle Advantage
Bobbie is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinion of the blogger and are not formally edited.
Last year the market was flooded by numerous and almost indistinguishable Android type tablets. Among those released was Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle Fire.
Many have perceived the Kindle Fire as an “iPad killer.” The Kindle Fire hasn’t exactly killed off Apple’s iPad, although it has made a dent in the market. The Kindle Fire is a seven inch tablet with about a $200 price tag that is a little bit more than just a video e-reader. The Fire has the ability to set the standard for how future mobile devices search the web.
Currently, mobile web browsers tease users but are ultimately disappointing. A typical user will tap into a link seeing the first elements of a page, smiling in anticipation. Then the user is forced to wait ten or twelve seconds as the progress bar creeps along for that page to finish loading which in an age of instant gratification is entirely too long. The problem arises from limited Wi-Fi and cellular connections.
Cellular and Wi-Fi load ques get log jammed delaying the desired instant access. This is a problem that will continue to reoccur even with the evolution of 4G and richer web languages like HTML5 so long as the telecom companies insist on using physical servers opposed to cloud type servers.
The Kindle Fire’s browser, know as Amazon Silk, relies on a more novel approach to its processing. Amazon Silk shifts most of its load operations to Amazon’s cloud servers thereby providing a quicker response at faster speeds compared to anything the Fire could perform internally. The Fire leaves the hard work to the Amazon Web Servers (AWS) and then pulls the needed information from the ethersphere. For instance, someone types in a page link; instead of loading that page element by element, the AWS loads the complete page (text, photos, videos, and all) and then uses a single stream to feed the information directly to the Fire. This allows for the most optimized content in the quickest possible way.
The Kindle Fire may be the first mobile device to browse this way but chances are it won’t be the last. Both Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) have the server capabilities to perform this type of computing. Considering that Amazon uses off the shelf coding, think HTML5 and Java Script, there is a lack of barriers to prevent competition.
As it stands only today’s technological limitations prevent Amazon and others from fully realizing and creating faster servers based browsing and setting new standards. It is little areas like this in which companies need to be seen for because they are the ones that will take markets by storm.
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