Amazon unveils $199 Kindle Fire tablet - CBS News (AP) NEW YORK - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Wednesday showed off the Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet computer, challenging Apple's iPad by extending its Kindle brand into the world of full-color, multipurpose devices.
I wish it would have a camera - but I guess for $199 it won't have all the bells and whistles. I'll be interested in reading an independent review of it when it hits the market.
The Motley Fool has a bit of information about it that you might find useful. What Investors Need to Know About Amazon's Tablet (AAPL, AMZN)
My favorite post and title about this is, " The Amazon tablet will look like a PlayBook -- because it basically is."
I didn't see much about technical specifications for the Amazon Kindle Fire. I recently purchased a tablet, the HP failure, TouchPad Wi-Fi 32GB but I wasn't going to even buy a tablet computer until that firesale.
This article from the WSJ has some technical information about the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet: Amazon Unveils Kindle Fire - WSJ.com "The device has a new Web browser called Silk, which is faster than other browsers because the software runs partly out of Amazon's data centers, the company said." "The Kindle Fire uses a Texas Instruments Inc. OMAP 4 dual core, one-gigahertz processor, Mr. Kessel said. Amazon only includes eight gigabytes of internal storage on the device as the company expects users to keep most of their content in the cloud, he added. The iPad uses a dual-core one-gigahertz processor designed by Apple." No microphone or camera.
Thanks. My HP TouchPad uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon Dual Core 1.5 GHz, underclocked to 1.2 GHz to save battery life. My son overclocked his to 1.9 GHz and he claims it is really fast.
Google and Apple to Feel The Heat from Kindle Fire - The Tech-FAQ "Interestingly, some are pointing out that Amazon is a bigger threat to Google and the Android eco-system than it is to Apple. While Amazon is using Google's Android, that fact is quite invisible to end users, as Amazon's interface is devoid of Google's branding. More importantly, however, is that Amazon has an eco-system of its own including its own App Store. There is a level of independence here that other manufacturers of Android powered devices don't have. Android being an open source project Amazon could very well just fork Android into an operating system of their own with their own eco-system surrounding it, effectively following an Apple-like strategy in which they control the entire process end-to-end, and don't depend on anyone. In that sense buying an Amazon tablet isn't quite the same thing as buying a just another Android tablet."
That's basically what Fusion Garage did with their Grid Tablet after failing with the JooJoo Tablet. They built their own user interface over Android. They don't even have the Android Market. You have to use Amazon Appstore and Fusion Garage personal Appstore to install Android Apps.
