The Kindle Fire 
is disrupting the tablet market, Amazon’s debut tablet and new edition to the Kindle family is worthy of review. The Fire is different. It has a color touch screen and can play video, for example. More significantly, Kindle Fire can run apps on a proper operating system which is a modified version of Google Android and does wireless networking. Below, the pros and cons of the Kindle Fire are compared.
- Priced Right
- Amazon Silk
- Kindle Fire Demo
- Email and Battery Life
- Limitations of Kindle Fire
- Kindle Fire Features
- Order Now
Priced Right
Sticker price, Kindle Fire is $199, less than half the price of a basic iPad 2 which is an obvious plus. Amazon is opting for much reduced margins on Kindle Fire hardware, just as it did with the first Kindle, and plans to make back money from content – sales of books, music, videos. The Kindle Fire is a consumer gateway to Amazon’s existing services.
Amazon Silk
Perhaps it’s most unique and impressive feature is a custom-designed web browser, called Silk. Amazon Silk is a cloud-accelerated browser that uses what developers are calling “split browser” technology to cache pages on sites before you click, speeding the time it takes to load a page. The result is a faster web browsing experience available exclusively on Kindle Fire. Also notable Adobe Flash is supported.
Kindle Fire Demo
Email and Battery Life
All major email providers are supported, send and receive from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, and others from a single integrated inbox. Expect about 8 hours of battery life when reading and 7.5 hours of video playback with wireless turned off. The Fire can be fully charged within four hours.
Limitations of Kindle Fire
- No Android Market - Amazon opted to forgo the tradition Android Market in exchange for their own Appstore. There are still plenty of quality titles but your Android purchases will not sync.
- No 3G or 4G connectivity - For those that require a data connection everywhere you may be disappointed that the Kindle Fire does not support 3G or 4G connectivity. The Fire only comes with WiFi connectivity that allows for B, G, N, and X connections with the standard security.
- No camera or microphone - With a low cost tablet some features were left behind and the Fire does not have a camera or microphone.
- Reliant on Amazon Cloud - Free storage on Amazon Cloud is great but can be limiting when offline and needing to access files. The lack of 3G or 4G support leaves users out of luck accessing Cloud files when they’re not connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Amazon takes cloud computing serious and the Fire ships with only 8GB of memory, which means that most of the content that its users will access will come from Amazon’s Cloud storage. In that sense, the Fire is the ultimate network appliance. The benefit of the cloud is you don’t have to worry about losing anything if it gets stolen or breaks, and upgrading the device anytime is simple.
Kindle Fire Features
- 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books
- Amazon Appstore
- Fast web browsing with Amazon Silk
- Free cloud storage for all Amazon content
- Vibrant color touchscreen and extra-wide viewing angle
- Dual-core processor
- Free month of Amazon Prime
- Full Kindle Fire technical details
Despite it’s limitations the Kindle Fire is feature rich, priced well below the competition, and introduces browsing technology we’ve never seen before. The first wave of Kindle Fire tablets will be in the hands of many consumers pre-holidays.
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