Either I’ve been living on Mars or Amazon has done a really good job of keeping the lid on their new product! The Kindle Fire is set to be debuted today and it looks like it could take on Apple’s Ipad on several fronts. According to what I’m hearing, it’s going to have a 7 inch screen and will run Google’s Android 2.x but will only be in the background. Evidently, Amazon built a custom OS that centers around all of Amazon’s retail and cloud services that it’s been building up for the last year or so. For example, it will have it’s Amazon AppStore preloaded but not the Google Market. I hear it will have a 1.2 ghz TI OMAP CPU at it’s core. On-device storage will be 8GB internally. The specs don’t indicate that you can increase it with a removable SD card so that kind of stinks. This is being billed as a multimedia device but my Nexus S phone has 16GB of internal storage! But you can use unlimited Amazon Cloud Storage. Full specs can be found here: Amazon Kindle Fire
The 7-inch Kindle Fire will sell for $199 and will come with 30 days of Amazon Prime. Amazon has a 10-inch version that will not be ready until early 2012 so they decided to launch the 7-inch version before Christmas and before Barnes and Noble releases their second generation of the Nook Color which will come out in the next few weeks or so.
The battle lines are being drawn with the tablet market between the IPad, the Kindle Fire, the Nook Color 2 and perhaps HP’s tablet that they recently dropped the price on. Time will tell which will come out on top. I’ll wait and see how things play out but I’d be interested to see how the 10 inch version of the Kindle Fire will look. But the 7-inch version seems so small. My phone has a 4-inch screen that works pretty well for me. I can’t see the need to buy another device to take with me places. However, it seems that they are dropping the price of the regular Kindle’s though. The Kindle Touch 3G will be selling for $149. The Kindle Touch will be selling for $99 and the Kindle (without Touch) will be selling for $79.
September 28, 2011 at 10:29 pm
Much appreciated for the information and share!
September 30, 2011 at 10:05 am
That is an issue I need to find more information about, many thanks for the blog post.