Kindle Fire Unveiled

Amazon’s Kindle Fire burns so bright that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has to close his eyes from the searing heat. Seriously, though, the event provided more than a few parallels to the iPad launches.

The Kindle Fire has a 7-inch, multitouch display with IPS (in-plane switching) technology and an anti-reflective treatment, 1024 x 600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi, with 16 million colors.

Analysts will give the edge to the iPad 2 display, which is larger. We think there is a market for 7-inch tablets. There just hasn’t been a credible one yet. Maybe the Kindle Fire will jumpstart that market.

The Kindle Store offers more than 1 million books, including 800,000 titles at $9.99 or less, all available on the Kindle Fire.

The Apple iBookstore has more than 200,000 titles which gives a distinct advantage to Kindle Fire.

Kindle Fire is also offering a Newsstand for magazines, where users may choose from hundreds of titles, such as Bon App??«tit, Elle and Oprah. Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ, which come with built-in video, audio and other features.

Apple offers its own Newsstand for iOS devices such as the iPad 2 with similar titles.

We’ll acknowledge the Kindle Fire has the support of Amazon’s Android Appstore for games and other apps.

Apple’s App Store is unparalleled, offering more than 400,000 apps, including more than 90,000 titles formatted for the iPad tablet form factor.

The Kindle Fire will provide a smooth on-ramp to Amazon Instant Video, including thousands of free movies covered under the e-commerce giant’s Prime service, which affords users free two-day shipping and unlimited streaming for some movies and TV shows with a $79 a year fee. The fire comes with one free month of Prime.

Sure, you can get movies on the iPad 2 through the device’s Videos app, but you won’t get the free content.

Amazon has a great offering here-17 million songs to stream from its MP3 service. Plus free cloud storage for all of its content, which Apple doesn’t offer.

Of course, Apple pretty much set the digital music standard with the iPod and its iTunes music store, which few can find fault with as a digital content juggernaut. Apple says simply that iTunes has millions of songs.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire includes a new split browser called Silk. It remains untested by consumers, but the company has high hopes for it because it can “learn” from users’ browsing habits to fetch results for subsequent Web content searches.

Of course, it’s hard to argue with Safari, one of the better browsers in the business, as it powers the iPad 2, iPhone and Macs.

The Kindle Fire goes on sale Nov. 15 for $199. That’s cheap! You can check it out or pre-order it here.

The iPad 2 has a base price of $499 for the 16GB model, though Piper Jaffray said most consumers buy the 32GB model for $599.