Did you sense the sarcasm? Ever since Amazon announced the Amazon App Store, we all have known that a dedicated “Amazon Tablet” would be right around the corner, the question was always “When”? Well, on September 28, Amazon announced a tablet to be called the “Amazon Kindle Fire”. The name is cool, although “Amazon Fire” would have worked a lot better for us. The specs are around average, 7″ inch multi-touch display (gorilla glass) , customized 2.3 Android Gingerbread, TI OMAP 4 (dual core) CPU, 512MB RAM, and 8GB of non-expandable storage. Now, some of these specs seem a bit outdated but the Kindle Fire has a few things in its favor. First, and perhaps the most important, is the extremely attractive price tag: $199. The price will capture two sections of people: “impulse buyers” and the “I’ll give it a shot” buyers. That’s not to say others who are just in the market for a tablet won’t buy or even enjoy the tablet but we think most of the initial sales will come from “Look what Amazon is doing”. Secondly, this goes along with our first point, it has the support of one of the internet’s favorite companies, Amazon. The ‘Fire will be supported for the sheer fact that it is Amazon and they will have their followers.
Now on to a couple things we do not like, like the “customized” skin overlay of Android. Unless it is extremely intuitive, which most skins are not, it would do more bad than good. The web browser funnels traffic to increase speeds according to Amazon, through the Amazon Silk web browser. The Android market is likely to not be included in favor of the aforementioned “Amazon App Store”, which depending on your perspective is either a good thing or a bad thing. The non-expandable storage could be in issue for some. I think on price alone this thing could directly compete with the iPad, which is currently dominating the market. Amazon hopefully has some tricks up their sleeve… now we wait.
