Today Amazon hosted an event in New York and unveiled the details of the much-speculated-about Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire will have a 7-inch color display and run the Android operating system. It is on sale for $199, which is significantly lower than the price of the Apple iPad. This is a heck of a price for a color tablet.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the device offers Wi-Fi connectivity, but does not offer 3G connectivity, and comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime. The device will have 8GB of onboard storage and a 1GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, and the display runs at 1024 x 600. Battery life is expected to be around seven hours of WiFi use from a full charge. It might remind some of the Blackberry Playbook as it looks very similar.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had this to say about the Kindle Fire:
“We asked ourselves, is there some way we can bring all of these things together into a remarkable product offering customers will love? The answer is yes. It’s called Kindle Fire.”
The device will enable users to access 100,000 movies and TV shows, a million songs, apps from the Appstore, magazines and books. For browsing the Web, Amazon has introduced Amazon Silk, a new browser experience that is said to store a cache of common files from around the web in the cloud, so none of it is stored on the device. This helps with browsing, as the device doesn’t have to pull as many files back to load a web page.
