Amazon Unveils the Kindle Fire; Will it Set the iPad Ablaze?
Amazon’s press bonfire event was centered around the company’s new Kindle Fire tablet today. The Kindle Fire is a $200 7-inch color tablet devoid of a microphone and camera. Amazon’s first tablet will run on Android, and and is set to tango with Apple’s iPad, which runs for $500 at the cheapest level. The event revealed some even tastier attributes, however.
Amazon Kindle Fire Specifications
- $200
- 7-inch 1024 x 600 pixel IPS Corning Gorilla Glass display with 16 million colors, 169 pixels per inch
- Dual-core TI OMAP4 processor
- 8GB internal storage
- 100,000 movies, 17 million songs, Android App Store, Kindle books available
- Free cloud storage on Amazon cloud
- Universal Search bar for device, web, or Amazon
- Android OS with radical bookshelf UI
- Whispersync that now includes videos and TV
- Est. Battery Life: 8 hrs reading, 7.5hrs video playback (Wi-Fi off)
- Wi-Fi
- Supports files: ZW, TXT, PDF, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, AAC, MP3, MIDI, OGG, WAV, MP4, VP8
- USB 2.0 (micro-B), 3.5mm audio, 802.11n Wi-Fi
- 7.5″ x “4.7″ x 0.45″ (190mm x 120mm x 11.4mm)
- 14.6 ounces (413 grams)
- Ships November 15th
The Amazon Kindle will also specialize in the company’s new Amazon Silk web browser, which places an emphasis on cloud computing. Dynamic Split Browsing is a phrase that should garner notoriety after this event is over. The Amazon Silk browser will cache content and scale it down based on the device you’re using to view it on. Jeff Bezos promises a much faster browsing experience. According to the press release, ”With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity, and cached content.”
Amazon has improved its Whispersync technology for the Fire, adding video and TV support. This will enable users to begin a movie on their tablet and resume it on their TV at home, for example. Kindle Fire buyers will also get a free month of Amazon Prime, which offers unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of over 11,000 movies and TV shows.
