Bezos
During a Sept. 28 presentation in New York City, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos positioned the Kindle Fire as a device capable of consolidating Amazons various multimedia and cloud services onto a single piece of hardware.
Kindle Sales
Before Bezos launched into the Kindle Fire part of his presentation, he offered a graph showing consumer uptake of Kindle e-books (red line) versus traditional books (yellow line).
Kindle Touch
In addition to the Kindle Fire, Amazon is offering a line of revamped (but still grayscale) touch-enabled Kindle devices.
Kindle Features
The new Kindle devices will continue to sync with Amazons cloud, and offer services via Facebook and Twitter.
Fire
Amazons Kindle Fire faces a variety of competitors, from Barnes & Nobles Nook e-reader to the Apple iPad.
Hardware
The Kindle Fires screen measures 7 inches, with its applications powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor. It runs a heavily modified version of Android.
Options
The Kindle Fire offers access to periodicals (via Newsstand, seen at top), books, music, video, personal documents, applications (via the retailers online app store) and the Web.
Amazon Silk
Amazons mobile Web browser splits processing duties between the device and Amazons EC2 Web services cloud, in theory accelerating the rendering of pages.
Kindle Extension
Amazon views the tablet as an extension of the Kindle line (hence the name Kindle Fire) as opposed to a device with separate branding.
Streaming
The Kindle Fire will come with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, which includes access to Amazons Prime streaming movie service.
Storage
Amazon is also offering free cloud storage with each Kindle Fire.
What’s Missing
Unlike some other tablets currently on the market, the Kindle Fire lacks a camera, microphone, or access to 3G or 4G LTE networks. Its WiFi only.
Price Point
The Kindle Fires $199.99 price could prove attractive to those consumers looking for a cheaper tablet. Were building premium products at non-premium prices, Bezos said during the press conference.??Ã
Storage
In addition to cloud storage, the Kindle Fire offers 8GB of internal storage.
Battery Life
Amazon has rated the Kindle Fires battery life at roughly eight hours.