So today is the day Amazon will be announcing their upcoming tablet, the Kindle Fire. Prior to Amazon announcing it officially, the company spoke to Bloomberg, revealing some details about the device.
For starters, the tablet will feature a 7” display, which seems to be in accordance with various rumors in the past. It will also be priced at $199, which is $300 cheaper than Apple’s base model iPad, and we’re guessing Amazon’s Kindle Fire’s price point will be what helps them to compete against the iPad, which many currently consider the tablet to beat.
As far as specs are concerned, the Kindle Fire will be running on dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP processor, a 7” 1024×600 IPS display made from Gorilla Glass, whose resolution is packing 169 ppi, which is higher than the iPad’s 132 ppi. It will come with 8GB of internal storage which seems little but is compensated by Amazon’s cloud music and movie services. It also does not appear to sport a camera, which we’re guessing is used to cut costs.
One of the interesting features of the Kindle Fire is its web browser, called the Amazon Silk. Its a split browser and uses Amazon’s EC2 engine, which will pre-process and optimize web pages in the cloud before delivering it onto the tablet. What this means is that Amazon will trim the fat off web pages and deliver an optimized version to the viewer, thus keeping things tight and consuming as little memory as possible while delivering web pages quickly.
It will be running on Android 2.1, which while may seem a little shocking and outdated, is heavily customized, so we’re guessing that some of the shortcomings of the original Eclair 2.1 may have been covered up or fixed. Amazon has appeared to have taken the platform and made it a lot simpler by removing unnecessary apps and features that may detract from the overall experience. It will even support Whispersync, which is Amazon’s method of synching data between multiple Kindle devices. Pre-orders will start from today although the device is expected to only start shipping on the 15th of November.
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