Amazon Fire Debuts One Day Early
Announced 6 weeks ago, Amazon announced it is shipping Kindle Fire, the $200 Android based tablet that is already touted as the the bestselling item on Amazon.com, one day early.
The tablet comes with modest hardware when compared to its competitors with 1GHz dual core processor, 7” 1024 x 600 IPS LCD, 512MB RAM; 8GB of storage with no cameras. The OS is Android Gingerbread with the user interface heavily modified by Amazon along with an enhancement called Amazon Silk, which accelerates the Web browsing speed by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud to render Web pages. The device only supports 802.11b/g/n. No 3G nor Bluetooth available. No HDMI port to output video.
Users can enjoy more than 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, apps and games, as well as free storage of Amazon digital content in the Amazon Cloud. 5GB for free and $20 yearly subscription gives additional 20GB capacity, Whispersync is enable for books and movies to consume media across devices. Since the only available internal 8GB of storage is fairly limited, users essentially have to rely mostly on streaming, especially for music and movies.
As a media consumption and an “online sale catalog” for Amazon, at start you will see seven items on top Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, and Web. The home page shows carousel of most recently used contents, with four user-assignable favorites at the bottom.
Each of the seven items provides a virtual "bookshelf-like" of item icons linked to the local –stored content and a link to Amazon’s relevant store where you can get:
- Over 100,000 movies and TV shows from Amazon Instant Video
- Over 17,000,000 songs from Amazon MP3
- Millions of books
- Over 400 full-color magazines and newspapers
- 100 exclusive graphic novels from DC Comics, including Watchmen, the bestselling graphic novel of all time
- Several thousand apps and games, including Netflix, Pandora, Hulu Plus, Rhapsody, and games fromElectronic Arts, Zynga and Rovio
- A free month of Amazon Prime, which offers two-day shipping and access to nearly 13,000 movies and TV shows available to stream at no additional cost and exclusive access to over 5,000 popular books from the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library to read on any Kindle device at no additional cost and with no due dates
Some first reviews seem to favor the device for its price and its purposes. The limited 7” size while is easy on the portability as a hard cover book, it is less convenient for illustrated magazine, comic reading where pinch and zoom is not available. Reader has to constantly double taps to make the page readable.
Customers can purchase now atwww.amazon.com/kindlefire.
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