Amazon now selling tablets by the six-pack

It was just recently that details about Amazon’s product refresh – and the rumored $50 Fire tablet – were leaked. It appears as though those rumors were true, and that the new 7in Fire tablet is indeed selling for $50. The tablet includes a 1024x600 IPS display, 8GB of internal storage and a microSD slot.

It also seems that the price point is so low that the company wants to outfit whole families with them. One of the options on Amazon’s storefront is to buy six of the inexpensive tablets at once. This kind of bundle suits corporate or family gift-giving, but it also makes sense if Amazon wants a tablet not just in every home, but in every room in the home. A consumer can use one for an alarm clock, another for cooking and so on.

In addition, while the Fire tablet isn’t going to match specs with any recent version of Apple’s iPad mini, it has essentially the same specs as the Samsung Galaxy Tab Lite; that device, however, sells for almost three times as much. At the time of this writing, it is the number 1 best seller in Amazon’s Computers & Accessories section.

In all, this is clearly a play to integrate price-conscious consumers into the Amazon ecosystem. The company’s main focus has not typically been in hardware, but in its Amazon Prime services, Kindle eBooks and bookstore.