The Kindle Fire color Android tablet is really going after Apple’s iPad, leveraging Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce
Amazon, the planets number one online retailer, just officially announced the Amazon ‘Kindle Fire’, their latest color Android tablet. The Kindle Fire is a step up from the regular Kindle in that it’s morphed from just an eReader, into an eReader plus a smokin’ tablet. And I might add, the price of the ‘Fire” is a ‘give-away’ at $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s cheapest iPad.
CEO, Jeff Bezos, is really going after Apple’s iPad, leveraging Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce. Sales of Amazon’s electronic books, movies and music on the device may help make up for the narrower profit margins that are likely to result from the low price, said Brian Blair, an analyst at Wedge Partners Corp.
“Amazon is really the only other guy, the only other potential tablet player, that has a similar offering to what Apple has,” Blair said in an interview last week. “If you look across their product offerings, they have content that none of the other tablet makers currently have because they have content on the media side.”
The technical specs for the new gadget include a 7-inch IPS screen with durable Gorilla Glass for extra strength. Powering the Kindle Fire tablet is a dual core processor, and as mentioned, Google Android as its OS. The Kindle Fire does not have an embedded camera or a microphone. The device offers Wi-Fi connectivity, though not 3G access, and comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, the company’s $79-a-year membership service that includes streaming video and free two-day shipping.
Amazon has a slightly different Android OS. They’ve made some tweaks, including an easier interface, and tied the device closely to its own large and growing content library of movies, magazines and music….100,000 movies, 17-million songs and an endless supply of eBooks….to be exact. They’ve also included Amazon Silk, which makes browsing run quicker on the device. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. predicts the tablet market will grow 51 percent a year through 2015.
For storing movies and other content, you have the option of Amazon Cloud Storage for free. Whispersync is compatible with this, which allows content to easily be streamed when needed.
As for the price, it’s launching at $199 on November 15th of this year, right before the holidays. You can pre-order at Amazon Click here.
Check out the first official Kindle Fire commercial…
http://youtu.be/jUtmOApIslE
