Technology
Amazon sets the tablet world on Fire
By Seattle Business Magazine September 28, 2011
After
months of feverish speculation, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled
the Kindle Firea 7-inch tablet computing system that many consider the first
legitimate threat to Apple‘s iPad at a press
conference in Manhattan Wednesday.
The
Fire is a touchscreen color tablet weighing 14.6
ounces with a 1024-by-600-pixel display. Perhaps even more importantly: The
tablet starts at $199 and uses Amazons cloud-based technology to let users to store virtually unlimited amounts of content. The device has only 8 GB
of internal memory, making the cloud-based storage an important component.
Unlike the iPad, the Fire will only run on Wi-Fi.
Customers
can pre-order the device on Amazons website, but the Fire will
not ship until November 15. Despite Apples significant head start in the
tablet market, Bezos says, We’re going to sell many millions
of these.
Amazon also unveiled an entirely updated line of Kindle
products. The most basic now costs just $79. A new touchscreen product called Kindle Touch starts at $99, and a
version of the same device with 3G wireless costs $149. Both Kindle Touch products
will ship November 21. All include ads that will
appear on the home screen when the device is idle. Kindles without ads will
cost $109, $139 and $189, respectively.
One of the more intriguing and most
novel features of the Kindle Fire is a new Internet browser called Amazon
Silk. Running at least partially on Amazons EC2 cloud technology, the browser
features split architecture. When running Silk, some of the work will be done
directly on the device while other aspects will run from the cloud. The company
believes this will expand the
boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of
your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network
connectivity of our cloud.
A
major advantage for Amazon comes from its unrivaled access to content. Kindle
Fire users will have at their fingertips 100,000 movies and TV shows, 17 million songs,
more than a million books on Kindle, major magazines and newspapers, and a library
of popular Android games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope.