This week, Amazon made a major announcement of a new series of Kindle Fires and Kindles through the media and at its Web site. And NPD offered its take on this. Read the announcement and the commentary beneath it.

After analyzing the announcement, NPD (the marketing research firm) commented on four issues at its blog: “The first is that, for the most part, the product line expanded upward in price and feature. Instead of offering aggressive absolute prices, Amazon is now choosing to compete by offering more, features, content, and services at equivalent price points to the competitors. Second is the decision to move to an 8.9” screen and put Bluetooth on-board most SKUs [versions]. This should allow a blossoming of the availability of new accessories and a significant growth in the ‘Made-for-Kindle’ business that Amazon has been tentatively exploring. The third interesting point for us is Amazon’s decision to create so many new SKUs [versions] differentiated only by storage amounts. Finally is distribution. Like the original Fire and the Kindle E-readers, Amazon has committed to using retail distribution [stores] to supplement their own Web site sales, a continuing tacit admission that the reach and presence of retail [stores] is necessary to be competitive with other products in the tablet market.”

Click the image to access NPD’s full blog post.