Amazon held an event in New York this morning to launch what everyone knew would be their new tablet. While there was much speculation and rumor going around we now have all the details on the new Kindle Fire. This will be a 7 inch tablet with a dual core processor that will run a forked version of Android (for most purposes you won’t be able to tell it’s Android). Of course it has Wi-Fi but has no camera, microphone, or 3G services. It will be tied intimately to all of Amazon’s services; the instant video, the mp3 store, and of course their Android App store. You will also be getting a free month of their Amazon Prime with the new device as well.
For the current Kindle e-readers Amazon uses its own Whispersync technology to sync what you are reading with all your devices. This will be very present on the Fire as well, as will Amazon’s cloud services, you will be able to store everything you buy from Amazon for free on their cloud, it will all be tied to your account and you will be able to delete whatever you want and bring it back whenever you’d like to keep space free on your device. This is huge since you can already store all your music through Amazon, you will be able to do this with your movies and TV shows as well.
They also announced their own web browser for the tablet called Silk. It is a ‘split’ browser, meaning that some of the computing will be done in the cloud to help speed up your browsing experience. It will be interesting to see how this works out for them, but the initial media testing seems to be giving the browser good reviews.
Most importantly though is the price, you can start pre-ordering now for a November 15th ship date with the cost only being $199. This is huge in the tablet world, while I don’t know that this will be the ‘iPad killer’ everyone seems to be waiting on, it will have a huge impact, I think the real people that need to be worried are the others in the 7” market, like Samsung and Motorola. The Fire is also very small, weighing in at only 14.6 ounces.
Amazon also launched a whole new line of Kindles today, starting with a base model for just $79 dollars, bringing in a Wi-Fi Kindle Touch at $99 and a 3G Kindle Touch at $149. The Touch models seem to be a direct answer to Barnes and Noble’s Simple Touch that comes in at $139 with Wi-Fi only. Although nothing was said about it they do appear at least currently to be still selling a keyboard model with a price drop too, $99 for the Wi-Fi and $139 for the 3G. All of these are with the “special offers” however, meaning that when it is in screen saver mode, you will see ads (local ads at that). You can of course get any of them with out this build in for $40 more. All of these new Kindles are shipping now so you can get them right away.
All in all I think Amazon is doing an amazing job here, they said it best when they said they were selling premium devices without the premium price, they are going to be hard to compete with this holiday season and I have a feeling they will be posting some huge numbers.
For more info you can check all of there stuff out at Amazon.com.
