This morning, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos finally took the wraps off Kindle Fire, a new tablet that could bring down prices across the board.
“Premium products at non-premium prices,” the CEO said.
Besides that special price, this 7-inch tablet can do books, magazines and apps, as well as movies, TV shows, games and web browsing. Content will be available from — you guessed it — Amazon.
Amazon Instant Video offers over 100,000 movies and TV shows, both for purchase and rent. Viewers also have the option for unlimited streaming via Amazon Prime. Amazon will offer one free month of Prime service with the purchase of Kindle Fire. After that, expect to pay $79 per year. There’s also 17 million songs available through Amazon MP3, a million Kindle books, hundreds of magazines, and much more.
Kindle Fire is also compatible with all of the most popular Android apps and games, such as Angry Birds. Amazon offers a new free paid app every day.
One key feature is that the online retailer will offer free storage in the Amazon Cloud. That means all of those movies, games, magazines, and more will be backed up for free in the “Amazon Cloud’s Worry-Free Archive,” where it can be downloaded at any time.
The Kindle Fire also has a brand new cloud-accelerated web browser, dubbed Amazon Silk. Featuring a “split browser” architecture, the browser boasts more power, thanks to the Amazon Web Services Cloud.
Whispersync technology is another new addition, which syncs your Kindle across various devices and platforms. One example is perfect for the at-home user, allowing you to start a movie on the Kindle out on deck, pause it, and continue it on a compatible HDTV.
Weighing in at just 14.6 ounces, Kindle Fire also features a 7-inch full color LCD touchscreen, IPS (in-plane switching), and a state-of-the-art dual-core processor. Amazon is taking pre-orders for Kindle Fire now, with plans to ship it on November 15.
If you think $199 is still too much for a tablet, you aren’t completely out of luck. Amazon announced a few additional Kindle devices today. The new Kindle Touch 3G is available for $149, with the Kindle Touch priced at $99, and the new Kindle coming in at the extremely low price of $79.