[mlinsey]

That rumored-for-years, never-confirmed-to-exist Apple tablet is just such a colossus that people are already predicting that the Kindle will be the next Betamax!

Other than that bold prediction at the end, a solid article. The succinct takeaway lesson from each product was a nice touch.

[netcan]

I agree that the Apple tablet thing is funny.

But.. The Kindle prediction is I think more about convergence then any specific Kindle killer. Will the average train passenger in 2015 own a Dell, a Chromebook, an ?? tablet, an iphone and a Kindle?

All of those four seem like they would be higher on an average person's shopping list. All four can be used to to Kindle like things. All four are getting better at doing Kindle like things. All four have the potential to introduce killer features that Kindle probably can't match. If someone already has 3 of the above, will they still get a Kindle?

What I think this type of thinking fails to consider is price. Kindle's might reach a point of 'perfection' pretty soon. IE, new models don't make old models obsolete, maybe. Kindle doesn't need more hard disk, memory, processing power. It's job stay the same. This means that Moore's Law and it's cousins can work on bringing down the price rather then improving the product. If the Kindle was $69, and marginally nicer to read some things on, regular people might still get one.

[mlinsey]

We can cut down even further from your list. Why carry around a cell phone when your laptop already has a 3G wireless card? When you want to make a phone call, you can just open up your laptop and fire up Skype!

If that sounds like a really cumbersome and painful user experience for many situations in which you currently use your cell phone, people who read really really religiously feel the same way about using a laptop or smartphone instead of a Kindle (or printed media).

The Kindle is and will continue to be a more niche product than laptops or phones. Not many people are serious readers. But for those who are, the user experience on a laptop, netbook, or smartphone can't compare, mostly because of form factor an eyestrain.

That's why I think only a tablet represents a serious threat to disrupt Kindle. Whether it's the mythical Apple tablet or the CrunchPad (RIP) or some other device that is actually built, if they manage to make a device that performs well in brightly-lit conditions, they can probably replace Kindle.

I suspect that in the next decade the average consumer will have three devices: One in a laptop form factor (with most having cheap netbooks running Chrome or another thin-client OS, and some power users having more traditional laptops), a phone, and a tablet or kindle-type device. The tablet or Kindle is ideal for reading and consuming media, the phone perfect for making calls, and the physical keyboard of the laptop necessary to get real work done.

Perhaps you could see some combinations, like a tablet that attaches to or connects wirelessly to a keyboard which eliminates the need for the laptop, or the phone just becoming a wireless headset interfacing with one of the other devices (maybe my opening question wasn't so implausible after all!). Frankly those combinations all sound pretty cumbersome and inelegant, so as long as all three devices are cheap and compact, having all three won't be a big deal.