By Steve Windwalker
The fun continued yesterday at Kindle Nation as we closed out our month-long Kindle Tablet Sweepstakes by selecting the name of grand prize winner Linda Ronne at random from the names of 4,233 Kindle Nation citizens who entered.
Although we have already given out two brand-new Kindles to Kindle Nation citizens who won our earlier sweepstakes in May and June, this one was a little different because, well, the grand prize does not actually exist yet! You may recall that this is the first sweepstakes involving a Kindle Tablet, and we went to considerable pains to make sure that our Grand Price winner would have plenty of peace of mind while waiting for Amazon to announce a Kindle Tablet. (See the legalese at the end of this post for the details of how we worded things to be fair to all concerned.)
Here’s what we said to Linda yesterday when we told her she was the winner:
“So now comes the tough part — waiting patiently for Amazon to announce its tablet. Our totally speculative guess is that they might announce it in late July for shipment in late August, because that worked so well with the Kindle 3 in 2010. But we shall see!”
But timing is everything, right? We just received word via a key member of our development team, Mark in Thailand, who shared a post from the UK about a report from Yenting Chen and Adam Hwang at DIGITIMES stating that “Amazon is poised to step into tablet PCs and will launch models as soon as August-September, with targeted global sales of four million units for 2011, according to Taiwan-based component makers.”
Sounds right to us, and we like the timing a lot! The only thing that doesn’t ring true for me is the projection of four million units for 2011. I’m thinking that if Amazon only gets 4 million units produced this year, the Kindle Tablet will be sold out for most of the last six weeks of the year, and we wouldn’t like to see that.
If you’re reading this, you may well be among over 4,000 Kindle Nation citizens who have signed up to receive our notification email when Amazon makes the Kindle Tablet available for pre-orders. We’re already preparing that email with all models and purchasing options spelled out, so that you aren’t among those who’s left waiting if the Kindle Tablet does go out of stock.
And, oh yes, here’s the small print from our sweepstakes rules:
Grand prize
There is one prize, total value estimated at between $200 and $750, consisting of a base model Kindle Tablet electronic device, which the sponsor expects to be manufactured and offered for sale by Amazon.com at some unknown time in 2011. If a base model Kindle Tablet electronic device is not manufactured and offered for sale by Amazon.com by December 18, 2011, the sponsor will allow the winner to substitute any existing Kindle product valued at $400 or less, or an Amazon.com gift certificate for $400. The phrase “base model Kindle Tablet electronic device” herein refers to the lowest-priced Kindle Tablet electronic device offered by Amazon at time of the device’s launch announcement. The winning prize will be shipped to the winner directly from Amazon.com at the sponsor’s expense, and the winner will have sole discretion as to whether she wishes to return the prize either for an account credit or for an upgrade to a higher-priced model.