Well it’s been coming for a very, very long time and now it’s finally, well, still coming. At least not it’s official: Amazon has announced its new Kindle Fire Android tablet for an amazing price of just $199 in the US (no solid details on pricing outside the US just yet), available for pre-order now or for purchase on the 15th of November in the US.
The Kindle Fire, as you may guess from the proposed price point, is a pretty basic tablet. There’s no 3G connectivity, relying just on WiFi for internet services. Cameras of any kind are also missing and storage is limited to just 8GB, so it’ll be difficult putting too many movies on it.
The 7 inch display also only sports a resolution of 1024 x 600, which won’t be amazing for video media either. It should still play media well, especially for such a cheap tablet, it just won’t wow anybody with its resolution, either.
However, the screen is Gorilla Glass, which means it’s extremely resistant to scratching. So you can throw it in a bag without too much worry about damaging it. Of course it’s always wise to protect a device like a tablet as much as possible, but the Kindle Fire shouldn’t scratch up accidentally like another tablet might.
However, there is at least one surprisingly up-market feature of the Kindle Fire. That is the dual-core TI OMAP 1GHz processor which should definitely keep things running smoothly. This CPU will offer similar performance (processor-wise) to the iPad 2, which is surprising considering the difference in price. No word on RAM yet, unfortunately.
Being an Amazon Kindle device, the Kindle Fire also has access to Whispersync. That means that selected media content will be backed up in the Amazon cloud. That means Movies, TV and eBooks are all synced. The syncing isn’t just aimed at making sure you have the same content across your devices, either. Rather it saves where you might be up to in a book, movie or TV show, so you can go from your tablet to your desktop without having to find where you were up to.
Strangely enough the Kindle Fire has access to the Android App store, but not the Google Android Market; the official Android app store that houses the greatest number of Android apps. So there will still be a plethora of apps, just not quite as many as on some other Android devices.
The Kindle Fire also apparently comes running on a custom version of Android 2.3.5 and not Android 3/3.1/3.2 Honeycomb. It shouldn’t really make a huge difference with an entry-level tablet like the Kindle Fire, but it’s still definitely worth a mention.
We’d like to know if anyone out there is interested in a $199 Android tablet, or if you’d prefer to pay a little more to get more functionality and services out of your tablet. What do you think?
Find a better phone plan
Thousands of cell phone plans unpacked. All the facts. No surprises.
Related Articles
Find Better Phones and Plans
Hundreds of cell phone plans unpacked. All the facts. No surprises.
