Amazon officially announces the Kindle Fire, Pre-Orders start Today

Amazon took long enough to finally announce their latest venture into the tablet game. Today they have officially launched the newest line of
Kindles, the Fire 7″ tablet. Keeping up with their abilities and ideas of making things affordable, the Kindle Fire will be available for a mere $200 and pre-orders have started today. Don’t go and get to overly excited yet though. The device won’t be shipping until November 15th.

Will it be the next big tablet to hit the consumers hand or will it be a flop? There is no doubt that the original Kindle was and still is a very popular and unique device. The Fire aims to take on the bigger fish though, but with less additional features. For starters Amazon didn’t install any cameras, microphones or 3G connectivity.

The UI is nothing like any Android user is used to. The average Joe won’t notice the typical Android UI we have all grown to love. You won’t find a typical home screen, Amazon has completely revamped the home area to their personal liking. The Fire is most likely running on a Froyo or Gingerbread build of Android and most likely won’t see any Honeycomb love any time soon, if ever.

Not to sound like I am down playing the device, there are many perks that the Kindle Fire offers. It only weighs in at 14.6 ounces and is sporting a dual-core processor. Amazon has truly integrated the ‘Amazon life style” into the Fire. Still offering all the access you would expect to find on an eReader plus the addition of their WhisperSync. Which allows you to rent movies and TV shows directly on the device through Amazon. Not to mention their Amazon App Store.

Amazon is also boasting a new web browser technology that they are extremely proud of. They are calling it Amazon Silk. It is basically a two-part browsing experience that will enhance how you surf the web. The consumer won’t notice anything different nor will they have to do anything that they aren’t used too. Amazon’s EC2 super computer cluster will actually do all the web page loading for you and browser on your device will load the ‘image’ of the page. Everything will look and feel like a normal browser. On top of all of that, the EC2 machines will also cache the web pages you visit most often and make those pages appear nearly instantly. The new cloud based browsing will decrease your web page load times and keep you moving swiftly through what is important to you.

What about some of the more technical specs? The screen is a 7 inch multi-touch display with IPS (in-plane switching) technology and anti-reflective treatment, 1024 x 600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi, 16 million colors. It offers 8GB internal storage but no mention of an external SD card. The battery is said to charge up in 4 hours and provide you 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video play back, with wireless turned of of course. They do make mention of USB 2.0 (micro-B connector) support too.

All in all it sounds like it should be a pretty great device for $200. I am interested to see if the developers out there take on the new Kindle Fire and revamp the entire thing. They have never ceased to amaze us before, why stop now? I am pretty excited about the Kindle Fire personally. Since the most I would ever do on my tablet is surf the web, play games and watch movies. At $200 I might even be able to afford one. You can jump on over to Amazon.com to take a closer look at the Fire and to put your pre-order in today if you are interested.

Source: Phandroid