1

My Kindle Fire doesn't have an SD slot either, micro or any other size. I was a bit surprised by that. It's got 8G of memory, but if you're downloading video that can get chewed up really fast.

For me,  since all I'm doing is books, it's huge. And it does have a USB port.

I think the reason for not including an SD was user interface, not hardware. The bookshelf metaphor for the GUI doesn't really easily represent an external storage device. If you add an SD, you need some way to move things onto it and off it again.

I think they probably could have fit the hardware in; it isn't really all the complicated. But it would have made the GUI far more unclean and confusing.

I bet it's the same with the Nexus 7.

2 Steven: In theory, you have a point, but in practice, the SD card is for advanced users, and is only for side-loaded content; anything you buy through the B&N store gets downloaded into the internal flash. The book reader application simply scans both the internal flash and the micro SD card and puts the content in a single list. I should qualify that, this is true on a first generation Nook, I suspect later Nooks continue this practice. (I have a Nook Color, but I've barely used the stock firmware, I'm using it with mod firmware as a basic Android tablet--the most used app is the Kindle app *grin*)
If the display quality on the Google Nexus 7 tablet is up to the standard of the Kindle and Nook tablets, I expect Amazon and B&N will have to drop prices significantly to be competitive; most other cheap ($200-$250) tablets have much lower quality displays.

3 Thinking it over, I suspect it's simpler than that.  At $199, Google are probably making next to nothing on the 8GB model.  But with no expansion slot, a lot of customers (me, for instance) will opt for 16GB model, paying an extra $50 for about $5 worth of flash chips.

I'd be more upset if it wasn't still amazing value for money.  Back in the day, I ran an entire phone company on less hardware than that.

4

Google doesn't care if they make money on this. What they're trying to do is to make internet access devices into commodities, and to put such devices into as many hands as possible.

That's because internet access devices are complements to Google's business.

They don't care about selling units with more memory, either. They don't want you using these devices stand-alone. They want you using them to get online, because when you're online then there's a good chance that Google is making money off you.

That's the entire point of the Android project. It's the reason Google spent a lot of money developing it, and then gave it away to anyone willing to build and sell hardware underneath it.

5 "I think the reason for not including an SD was user interface, not hardware."
I can't speak to Kindle and Nook, but this makes no sense for generalized Android hardware:  there's already a simple UI in the system settings for mounting/unmounting an SD card.  Google would have had to actively disable the feature in the OS.  Pixy's probably right in comment #3.
Stephen, bear in mind that on Android phones, large apps--typically games--are frequently designed to go onto an SD card instead of in the device's internal memory.  My phone has ~1GB of free internal storage but comes with an 8GB micro SD.

6 The UI for mounting-unmounting is there, but UI for data manipulation is not. There is no File Manager nor Finder.

Lack of GPS in Kindle Fire was a bit of a problem for me, and surprisingly, too. Getting a WiFi GPS to work was kludgy and expensive.

7

The Kindle Fire is a device which is supposed to help the owner buy books and movies from Amazon. Would inclusion of a GPS make the owner even more likely to buy books and movies?