By Eric Hargrove aka. Mr. Beige
Photo courtesy of Amazon.com
Amazon has just introduced the new Kindle Fire, its highly-anticipated tablet device offering. The Kindle Fire brings a 7-inch form-factor that not to0 dissimilar from that of the Blackberry PlayBook and runs an Amazon flavored custom Android user interface that seems to be pretty spectacular.
As mentioned before, Amazon's Kindle Fire is very similar in appearance to the BlackBerry PlayBook, but I challenge you to find a tablet that doesn't look similar in some way. It weighs 414g (14.6oz) which is fantastic for one-handed use. It also packs a 1024 x 600 pixel, 7-inch IPS display. The Kindle Fire has a dual-core, 1GHz, TI OMAP4 processor under the hood, and it offers 8GB of internal storage. Unfortunately Amazon's offering does not have any cameras, nor does it offer a microphone. It also is Wi-Fi-only. Bummer for those of us who were hoping for 3g or 4g connectivity. Amazon does, however, promise 7 hours of continuous video streaming with its built-in battery.
The Kindle Fire UI is Android at heart, but by looking at it, you would never know it. In a stroke of genius, Amazon has designed the interface to look like a bookshelf, and has created the ability to give quick access to all of your media and digital content. The Kindle Fire also incorporates all of Amazon's digital media services, so you can literally go direct to your content without the need to sync to a secondary computer or device
Another great attribute of the Kindle Fire is that it is capable of multitasking, something that HP was hoping they would be able to really wow people with when they released the lackluster TouchPad WebOS device. (HP, take a note.) The Kindle Fire allows you to do just about everything that today's demanding techno-sumer could want. Listen to music while browsing the web, or reading your favorite novel. Apparently you can also share video to TV on the same network.
Lastly, make way for Amazon's new browser called Silk. Amazon is leveraging its server network and hosting services to bring a snappier user browsing experience. Amazon decided to try out splitting the work of processing information between the Kindle Fire and it's servers back home. This is a much more efficient way to handle data than what we have seen in the past. It is said that the Silk Browser also incorporates data gathered from large user groups to anticipate and preload the pages that the end user will probably go to next
Once the Kindle Fire hits stores on November 15th, it will retail for $199. As part of the deal, customers will get a 30-day trial subscription to Amazon Prime, as well as the included streaming video service for free. If you are one of the tech junkies that must have only the newest and the best, you can pre-order the Kindle Fire here.
Take a look at this video segment on CNN.com
