Four years ago, this month, Amazon released its first e-reader for just under $400. Today, we are anxiously awaiting the release of a full-on tablet, from the internet retailer. The tablet will cost less than $200. This is half the price of their debut devise and more than twice the machinery.
Looking at the tablet; it is very simple, offering very little in the form of style. It looks like a black slate with “Kindle” printed on the back. On the bottom it has a micro-USB slot, 3.5mm headphone jack and a power button.
Some have said many things about the new Kindle, Such as calling it the “iPad Killer”. This, I believe, is an over exaggeration. While the Kindle Fire offers a great price and some neat specs to a new level of the low-end tablet market, it is still another android tablet. Android phones have been pressing against the iPhone for years and still have not taken the thrown.
The UI is less than optimized in some areas. The size of the display makes reading magazines and comic books harder to see than a 10 incher would allow. In some of reading apps, such as children’s books and comics, the only way to see some of the text is to double tap. No pinch to zoom here. The magazines, however, does allow zooming to see the miniscule text.
The Fire is a small slate at only 7″. It weighs close to 15 ounces and is .45″ thick. The 1 Ghz dual-core OMAP CPU is sufficient for the price point, but underpowered compared to most of the competition. Amazon has also customized the Android firmware on the Kindle to run very smoothly on the hardware. It also relies strongly on the Amazon servers to work to it’d maximum potential.
The real draw to the Fire is the ability to access content. With this new tab you can access Amazon to stream books, music and video from their servers. Those servers also allow you to access content on the web quicker by working with the native web-app to load entire web pages in the cloud and shipping it directly to your tab as one piece of information. Amazon’s cloud also cashes commonly called upon content for an even faster way to deliver it to the users.
Overall, this seems like more devise than you’d expect for the $200 price. It is slightly underpowered and less than optimized due to its smaller stature. It does not have access to the Android market, but instead has its own Amazon app store. When spending $200 dollars on anything, it gets hard to complain about the shortcomings. However, killing an iPad is far from this guy’s future.
Sources, Pcmag.com, ChristianPost.com, arstechnica.com, engadget.com