Dear Amazon, Here’s How You Should Sell Your Tablet

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Dear Amazon,

Hi, it’s me, Doug Aamoth—Amazon Prime member, Subscribe and Save junkie, Cloud Player user, lover and friend. So this Android tablet of yours is looking more and more like a reality, which is cool. I think you have a lot of the right pieces in place to pull it off.

But as someone who’s spent thousands at your site AND watched Android tablets stumble around like members of a vertigo support group at the top of a steep driveway right after an ice storm, I have some advice for you as you embark on this mystical journey known as trying to sell tablets to people.

The Size

“A roughly nine-inch screen,” as reported by the Wall Street Journal? Nice. That’s the Goldilocks zone as far as I’m concerned: big enough to make watching movies and surfing the web on it enjoyable but not so big that you can’t hold it in one hand. And if you really want to, you’ll probably be able to play the old “lighter than the iPad” card if you find yourself in a jam.

The Ecosystem

You’re about the only retailer that can pull off an Apple-like experience with this tablet, which is a huge plus. You’ve got your own app store, music store, video store, and e-book store. Make those things front and center—and brain-dead easy to navigate—and you’ll be golden. But don’t block access to the Android Market or other services that sell the same kinds of stuff you do.

(MORE: Tablets: ‘Why Should Somebody Buy This Instead of an iPad?’)

Make the entire integration as Apple-like as possible for “regular” people and then let geeks load up their own stuff if they want. Apple gets dinged by geeks for being too closed and Android gets dinged by regular people for being too confusing. You can have one foot in each camp here.

Pricing Your Tablet Without Killing the Kindle

Your tablet has the Journal wondering how you’ll “keep from cannibalizing” your Kindle e-book readers. They referred to it as a “conundrum,” which sounds pretty serious. And the New York Times says you have multiple conundrums—more than one conundrum! Be careful!

The bottom line is that you need to price this thing low enough to blow all the other Android tablets out of the water but you can’t price it so low that nobody buys a Kindle. Fortunately, you have a few options here:

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