Report: Amazon to release $50 tablet

Amazon is planning to release a $50 tablet (probably £40/€60) this holiday season, according to The Wall Street Journal. Featuring a mono speaker and a 6-inch screen, the device would be half the price of the company’s cheapest Fire tablet, the Fire HD 6, which is £79 ($99) with "special offers" and £89 ($114) without. The unnamed product looks to be part of a planned trifecta that includes tablets with 8-inch and 10-inch screens. It is currently unknown if the other two devices will feature similarly rock-bottom prices.

The news follows last month’s reports that the online retailer has laid off dozens of employees and “scaled back” on numerous development projects following the disastrous sales of the Fire Phone. Amazon had announced a quarterly net loss of $437 million (£284 million) in August. Its flagship smartphone was cited as the single largest contributor to the situation, with $170 million (£110 million) of the aforementioned figure attributable to “Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs.” Last October, it was reported that the company held $83 million (£54 million) in unsold Fire Phones.

Smartphones are not the only area in which Amazon has suffered. With the proliferation of budget Android tablets, the company has long had trouble in securing a foothold in that market as well. The Kindle Fire line-up held a 33 percent market share in 2013, but that number has since plummeted drastically. According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC), Amazon held a paltry 2.3 percent of the market share in the fourth quarter of 2014.