TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Watts Martin:

I’m sure this headline is leading a pack of “Amazon’s iPad-killer” heads out there—the 9to5 piece quotes a Bloomberg piece that starts, “Chief Executive Office Jeff Bezos is betting he can leverage Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce to pose a real challenge to Apple’s iPad after tablets from rivals have fallen short.”

No, he isn’t, you blithering morons. The Fire is not directly competing with the iPad. It’s directly competing with the Nook Color.

True—there’s very little, if any, reason to purchase the Nook Color now. But I do think the Kindle Fire will end up taking away some of the iPad’s low-end sales. Browsing the web, watching movies and reading books are why a lot of people buy an iPad in the first place, and from the looks of it, the Kindle Fire will do those things well, and at a very attractive price.

The Kindle Fire is interesting because it isn’t trying to compete with the iPad on its own terms. Rather, it is playing a different game—it’s a media tablet, not a computer. It’s easy to hold for reading books or watching video, and small so it’ll fit in any bag. Whereas the iPad has a grand vision for the future of computing, the Kindle Fire simply wants to be a great companion device for reading books, watching movies, browsing the web and playing games.

And that’s a convincing device. It’s going to sell well. What I’m really curious to see, however, is what effect it has on iPad sales. If the iPad 3 is released and continues to sell like crazy, we’ll know that they very much are in different categories and people don’t buy the iPad just for those basic functions. But if it puts a damper on iPad sales, that’ll tell us something important, too.