Amazon have just announced their new Kindle ‘Fire’ tablet. So far other tablet computers have been similar in specification to the iPad (or in lots of cases not nearly as good) yet they’ve been the same price. With inferior UI’s and Apps stores too there’s been zero reason to buy them, especially as they’ve been pretty much the same price as an iPad too.
Although a different form factor at just 7 inches, the $199 price tag means the new Fire is less than half the price of the iPad, so at last there’s a compelling reason to consider something other than the Apple device in the ‘post pc’ tablet market. Read on for all the specs and the skinny on the link to Amazon Prime Bezos has cleverly integrated into the offer.
To reach that keen price, Amazon has eschewed the integration of a camera, microphone or 3G, though the Fire will come with WiFi and a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime. Prime membership typically costs $79 per year and grants the benefits of free two-day shipping and access to Amazon’s video-streaming service.
- Kindle Fire – $199 Pre-Order Today – UK or USA
- Ships 15th November
- 7″ Multitouch IPS Screen 1024×600 16M Colours (2 point multi-touch only?) with Gorilla Glass
- 1GHz TI OMAP 4 Dual-core processor – Multitasking
- 512MB RAM, 8GB Flash Storage
- 14.6 ounces / 414 g
- Android 2.3 Based – But Heavily Customised UI
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
- 8 Hour Battery Life
- Includes 30 Trial of Amazon Prime
- No Camera, No microphone, No 3G, No Bluetooth, No GPS
- New Amazon ‘Silk’ Cloud-Accelerated Web Browser (see video below)
- Works with the Android Appstore
- Works with the MP3 store – 17 million songs
- Works with Prime Instant Video Streaming – 100,000 Movies & TV shows
- Works with News Stand – Full-color magazines /Books etc all stored for free using Amazon Cloud Storage
- Other Kindles Launched today – Touch 3G for $149, Touch for $99, and Kindle for $79
- Awaiting UK Pricing
Exciting times in tablet-land! Frustrating to have products announced weeks before one can buy them though 🙂 It will be interesting to see whether the cut down Fire functionality will be valued – the pricepoints are pretty impressive though. Which is good, because once you have a Kindle, your book expenditure goes through the roof…
Hmmm. Hardware on a par with Advent Vega (for example) and at the same price point. Big benefit comes from the caching proxy server that all requests are passed through, unless I’m mistaken. (?) So for non mainstream content, is there still an advantage to being tied into the annual contract? Or is it a return to AOL’s walled garden? Just thinking out loud. R.