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The much-awaited Amazon Tablet has just made its debut, and those who have been anticipating an iPad killer will be keenly disappointed. The Amazon Kindle Fire has plenty to offer, but it lacks the range or versatility of the iPad and similar full-fledged tablets. What it brings to the table is fluid interface,  a cloud-accelerated web browser, and the full range of Amazon’s content services – all of these and more for $199 only.

 

As rumors hinted, the Amazon Kindle Fire is a splitting image of the $499 Blackberry PlayBook. They look hauntingly the same, except that the Amazon Kindle Fire has narrower bezel. While they look the same, feature-wise, the Kindle Fire easily outdoes its pricier RIM counterpart.  The Fire has richer range of songs, movies, books, periodicals, TV shows, and apps available for free or for a fee. After all, the Kindle Fire is purposely-built as a serves as conduit for Amazon’s retail content just like Apple weds its iPad into its ecosystem of apps and music.

 

Features – Hardware and Software

 

The Kindle Fire, like the Blackberry PlayBook , features a 7-inch multi-touch display with 16 million colors. The panel uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology like the iPad, providing users good view from all anges. The display is coated with anti-glare layer, but the Kindle Fire remains hard to view under direct sunlight.  It measures 7.5 x 4.7 x 0.45 – though not pocketable, it easily slips into a handbag or purse. It weighs 14.6 ounces, about the same weight as the PlayBook.

 

The Kindle Fire is powered by a dual-core processor, allowing you to run multiple tasks at the same time, such as streaming music while reading books or playing games while downloading videos, without slowing down the tablet. Although it has Android under the hood, there’s no trace of Android. The interface is uniquely Kindle, and it runs its own app store. Still, as demonstrations have shown, the tablet runs Android games very well.

 

To cut down on costs, Amazon built only 8GB of internal storage into the device, roughly half the storage size of most tablets.  8GB is good enough for 80 apps plus 800 songs and 6000 songs, but this fills up quickly and there’s no SD slot on the device for additional storage. Amazon hopes that users will overlook this lack by integrating free cloud service into the Fire.  However, as the tablet’s wireless service is via WiFi only, streaming content or getting content into Amazon’s cloud is not possible in all circumstances.

 

Also integrated into the Kindle Fire is Amazon’s very own Web browser called Silk. The browser’s speed is boosted by Amazon’s cloud network.  What the browser does is  it gathers and stores user search behavior , then uses this information to predict where you will like go next when you open a website. The browser then caches the page in advance, resulting in quicker load times.

 

Pros

• Interface is fast, intuitive, and user-friendly.
• The Amazon Kindle Fire supports Flash.
• You get a month’s use of Amazon Prime for free.
• You get lots of content – over 17 million songs in the Amazon MP3 Store, millions of books in the Kindle Store, over a hundred thousand movies and TV shows in Amazon Prime, and over 15 thousand apps in the Amazon App Store.
• Glass display is durable and scratch-resistant.
• Color display is great for children’s books as well as magazines, graphic novels, comics, and the like.

Cons

• The Amazon App Store has about 15,000 apps – an app pool that is relatively small especially if you compare it to iPad’s 425,000 apps.
• You can’t customize the home screen with widgets, wallpapers, etc.
• The tablet doesn’t have a camera and microphone – you can’t use it for video chatting or for recording audios.
• There’s no mobile broadband; you have to hunt for a WiFi network to get Internet connection.
• There’s no GPS functionality.
• There’s no multi-touch support; the display recognizes two-finger touches only.
• It will not run DRM-protected text and audio content as well as ePub books.

The Bottom Line

 

The Kindle Fire is not as versatile or as fully featured as the iPad, but for its price of $199, it offers incredible value. No other tablet within this price range has the Kindle Fire’s richness of media content.  It is aimed to knock off the Nook Color off its perch. From the looks of it, the Kindle Fire can easily do it in one fell swoop — unless the upcoming Nook Color 2 offers better features and services.

- Kindle Fire - U.S. power adapter - Quick Start Guide.

Main Feature - 7" multi-touch full color display with IPS technology - Durable Gorilla Glass display - Amazon Silk browser - 8GB internal storage - Dimension: 7.5 x 4.7 x 0.45 inches - Weighs 14.6 ounces - Battery life of 6 to 8 hours depending on usage - WiFi wireless connection Key Features - Easily fits into a purse or handbag; light and portable - Access to all of Amazon’s digital media content (apps, music, books, games) - Free cloud storage - Built-in email app - Automatic synching feature Bonus Features - Free one month Amazon Prime