It was only a couple of months ago that I was blogging about the online battle between the iPad and Kindle. Back in August, iPad dominated the UK search market, with twice as much search volume as the Kindle. Amazon’s announcement last week of a new backlit tablet to challenge the iPad, called the Kindle Fire, has turned the market on its head.
Looking at the top search variations last week for all Kindle and iPad terms you can see that ‘kindle fire’ was the top search term overall, twice as popular as the term ‘ipad’.
You can see by charting the top terms the explosion of growth of searches for ‘kindle fire’ and how it overtook searches for ‘ipad’ and ‘ipad 2’.
Back in August when I wrote about Kindle closing the gap on the iPad the search volume for all iPad and Kindle terms was very much in Apple’s favour, with 70% of all searches being for the iPad and only 30% for the Kindle. With the announcement of the Kindle Fire, that gap has narrowed considerably, with the split now 60-40 in favour of the iPad.
Of course, one of the key issues that makes the Kindle Fire so appealing is the price, as Amazon will reportedly be making a loss on each unit sold at $199. Given that Amazon has yet to announces a UK release data for the Kindle Fire, it is perhaps not surprising that people were much more interested in release dates and reviews rather than the price of the tablet. As the individual keywords tool shows 6.05% of all Kindle Fire searches included the word ‘release’ but only 0.60% contained the word ‘price’.
The Kindle Fire does definitely give Apple a credible competitor in the tablet market, especially after the TouchPad was dropped by HP. Apple are set to make a press announcement later today which we expect will be the official unveiling of the iPhone 5. UK Internet searches for the anticipated smartphone have been growing since October 2010 and overtook searches for the iPhone 4 in June 2011.
Searches for the iPhone 5 reached a new peak last week, accounting for 1 in every 1000 searches in the UK. We will be monitoring the changes in search behaviour in the run up to Christmas and will be sharing our findings through the blog, on Twitter and in our webinars.