Finally, Amazon has announced the new Kindle Fire tablet with WiFi connectivity. The new Kindle Fire tablet flaunts a nice 7 inch IPS display and houses a dual-core 1 GHz processor. Amazon will offer bunch of cloud services and storage with the Kindle Fire tablet. This new tablet is available for US citizens for pre-order starting today at price of $199 (Rs 9800 approximately) and will start shipping from November 21.
The Mobile Indian reported earlier that Amazon Kindle Fire tablet will not have any cameras and will note possess any 3G network support.
Jeff Bezos, president and chief executive officer, Amazon at the launch stated that the Kindle Fire tablet has anti-reflective coating and constructed with Corning Gorilla Glass technology. This display supports 1024×600 Pixel Resolution and has 169 pixels per inch density.
Amazon has customised the Android user interface and tablet is not running the Honeycomb OS but instead running some currently unidentified version of the operating system.
Under the mere 11.4 mm thick chassis, the Kindle Fire houses a dual-core 1 GHz TI OMAP4 family Processor coupled with 512 MB RAM to support a customised version of Android operating system. With 8 GB onboard storage, this tablet only supports WiFi wireless connectivity. There is a Micro USB 2.0 connector port and a 3.5mm audio port to hook any pair of earphones.
Kindle Fire features a new tablet web Browser called Amazon Silk that uses hardware power of the tablet along with the power of Amazon cloud services for speedier performance. Amazon Silk works on split architecture and is a brand new web browser for tablets albeit with different work mechanism compared to traditional web browsers.
Silk name has been coined from actual silk thread and stands for invisible yet incredibly strong connection to fetch the web pages from the Amazon Web Services cloud servers to the Kindle Fire tablets. Based on the user’s browsing preferences and behaviour along with the learning from other web servers, the Amazon Silk browser uses predictive technology pre-cache the web pages on the tablet itself which eventually allows faster loading.
Kindle Fire supports Whispersync technology to sync the user’s Kindle eBooks library along with other things such as bookmarks, notes and highlights. The Whispersync technology even extends to video offering to continue where user exactly left off watching movie or TV Show on the TV. With that Amazon has opened up its library of 18 million movies, TV shows, apps, games, songs, books, newspapers, magazines, audiobooks and other content for the Kindle Fire users.
The tablet also brings Amazon App Store to allow users to browse, purchase and install several Android apps. For all the apps, movies, TV shows, and ebooks, Amazon offers free unlimited Cloud Storage as well — only for Amazon Content.
Research analyst Gene Munster from Pipper Jaffery stated that Amazon is keen and focused on providing super content delivery by leveraging on its Cloud servers based services. However, the company is likely “losing about $50 per Kindle Fire” and that corresponds to the hardware upfront.
Initially the Amazon Kindle Fire will be sold through Amazon Digital Services in the US only and we are not aware whether company plans to start shipping the tablet worldwide. Two years ago, India has got the Kindle as part of Amazon’s Global expansion. However, there are no intimations on whether the Kindle Fire tablet will be available in India as well.
Without any camera, the Kindle Fire is purely content consumption device where one can read eBooks, watch videos and listen to music at one’s comfort.