Amazon's new tablet, announced by Jeff Bezos last month in an orgy of hype, is the latest, and perhaps the most credible, device to threaten Apple's near total domination of the tablet sector that they effectively created from the picked-over remains of the "Windows tablet" less than two years ago.
But what do you really need to know?
The idea of the Kindle Fire is that it is an entire ecosystem, rather than simply a product made of mundane hardware and software components. It leads the user from Amazon's extremely successful, but extremely monochrome, Kindle eReader to a vibrantly colourful world consuming movies, magazines, books and Apps all, they hope, purchased from Amazon's online store.
The revenue that they expect to channel to this store helps Amazon subsidise the tablet's purchase price, which, at $199, is very competitive compared with the iPad and competing Android tablets.
It seems churlish to mention it, but this first step on the road to Amazon's domination of the new technicolour world has been described by several commentators as a bit of a stop gap solution. Something to help protect Amazon's market share from the rather similar Barnes and Noble Nook Color which has been around for a while and is due for an update shortly. To do this job during this year's crucial Christmas shopping season, this first Kindle Fire had to be announced this month so it might have been a but rushed and hence it bares a very close physical resemblance to the Blackberry Playbook - coming as it does from the same designers.
While the Kindle Fire's screen looks pretty good, all the technical details are, so far, rather sketchy. It has a dual-core processor based on a design by the British company, Arm. This is probably more or less identical to the processor in the slightly larger Apple iPad 2, but a little behind the wave compared to the latest Android tablets on the market, like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The Kindle Fire's software is a heavily modified version of the also rather out-of-date Android 2.1.
Last, but for us in the UK certainly not least, we may never see it. The video/movie streaming service (see fact 1), the Amazon Appstore for buying all those games and and Barnes Nook Color aren't available in the UK and since these are the main drivers for launching the device now, the pressure on Amazon to sell here is less. Added to that, there are rumours that they may struggle to keep up with US demand. And just in case that wasn't enough they have said they have as yet "no plans" for the UK release date. So the first Amazon Tablet we get to fondle may in fact be next year's sexier second generation Kindle Fire 2.
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is the latest, and perhaps the most credible, device to threaten Apple's near total domination of the tablet sector that they effectively created from the picked-over remains of the "Windows tablet" less than two years ago.