The Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet Introduced at $199

Amazon has officially introduced the Kindle Fire tablet, one of the most anticipated mobile devices in recent history.  This 7 inch tablet is being marketed more as a super-Kindle than as an iPad-killer, but with a price that is less than half of the iPad 2, it may very well be both.

The Amazon Kindle Fire features a customised version of Android, and runs Amazon’s own cloud-friendly Silk browser.  While Amazon CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos has been very careful in not even calling the Fire a tablet, Michael Morgan from ABI Research and other analysts have no such problem.

“I suspect Amazon may have finally figured out what’s needed in a tablet,” Morgan told TechNewsWorld. “It’s all based on content, and nobody’s better at this than Amazon,” Morgan said.  Other tablet manufacturers have struggled keeping up with the amount of content available on the Apple iPad, and Amazon are perhaps the only other company who have the ability to offer users what they want.

The Kindle Fire features a 7 inch multitouch display with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, 8GB of internal storage, and free cloud storage for all Amazon content.  Amazon are promising up to 8 hours of battery life per charge when reading, with 7.5 hours of video playback.  However, these figures are without WiFi, which is likely to consume much more.

Other key specs include a USB 2.0 port, support for 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.1X, and support for these file format:  Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, non-DRM AAC, MP3, MIDI, OGG, WAV, MP4, VP8.

Analysts have been speculating about the price of this device for months now, with most people agreeing that Amazon would sell this device for as cheap as possible in order to break the back of the iPad.  They have done exactly that, with the $199 price tag beyond many people’s expectations.  The Amazon Kindle Fire will be available from November 15.