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Amazon shipped its Kindle Fire tablet a day early in the US, but its haste to get its device onto the shelves belied a long build-up to the launch, particularly in bolstering the cloud services and stores which will support the product, and provide the real revenue model for Amazon.

CEO Jeff Bezos reiterated his favorite point about the Kindle Fire - it's about the content, not becoming a device vendor per se. He said in an interview with Wired that the $199 slate was "a fully integrated media service. Hardware is a crucial ingredient in the service, but it's only a piece of it." Of course, that enables Amazon to set a price which some believe is lossmaking, and Bezos refuses to be fazed. He added: "We think it's a unique approach in the marketplace - premium products at non-premium prices. We're a company very accustomed to operating at low margins. We grew up that way. We've never had the luxury of high margins, there's no reason to get used to it now."

But behind the hardware, Amazon will be hoping that cloud services, apps and digital content will push its margins higher over time, even though it has warned investors that the low price of the Kindle Fire, coupled with its launch costs, will hit profits in the current quarter. The Fire, as Bezos points out, is the front end to a cloud services infrastructure which has taken a decade to build.

That fact is arousing developer interest, and according to a new survey from Appcelerator and IDC, the Kindle Fire is already the Android tablet for which north American programmers most want to write code - well ahead of longer established, but more expensive, Android slates, and only a few points behind the iPad's position in the same survey, when it made its debut.

Appcelerator surveyed 2,160 of its mobile developers at the start of November and found that, among the north American respondents, 49% were "very interested" in developing for the Fire, just four percentage points behind the iPad's initial score. Worldwide, the Kindle Fire scored 43%, even though it will not be available outside the US for an unspecified period, though it was second to the Samsung Galaxy Tab on 56%.

The reasons cited for interest in the Fire were the low price, Amazon's content ecosystem, its app store, its target demographic and the close integration with ecommerce tools. Negatives about the Fire were fragmentation, lack of a camera and the absence of GPS (and the survey did not include the latest Barnes & Noble Nook tablet, which is the Fire's closest rival in terms of form factor and price).

The Amazon Appstore, already a factor in developer enthusiasm for the Fire, has been redesigned to support the tablet launch, upping the ante against dominant Android store, Google's Andoid Market. According to a number of reports, Market has been losing customers to Amazon because the Appstore is easier to use. The latest update has changed the color scheme to match the Fire's charcoal and orange, and also now supports in-app purchasing and parental controls. Download and load times have been improved, says Amazon.

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