Amazon, the world’s largest retailer has built Kindles for some time. Their primary purpose (being reading) they featured matte-reflective black and white only displays. Today, that’s changed – big time. Amazon’s Kindle Fire, at just a penny under $200 is threatening to put the Vita and 3DS in their place.
A credible source (Read: Bloomberg) reported on the Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet earlier today, which Amazon later announced. It features a 7 inch screen, dual core processor and 8GB of storage for games, books and other media. Unfortunately, to keep the price low the device lacks any cameras, GPS, Bluetooth and only has 512MB of RAM under the hood. It runs Android 2.3 ‘Gingerbread’ and Amazon has made no promise of upgrading that specification at this point.
This could be the perfect gaming device (though we don’t know the specs of the GPU at this point) for the budget conscious with a price so low it threatens the market the Vita hasn’t entered yet, and Nintendo is having a hard time recapturing with competitors like the iPad and Android devices. It also features 8 hours of run time, a big hand up on both Nintendo and Sony’s offerings.
According to Amazon they’re using their cloud might to pre-render web pages in their cloud servers in a web browser they call ‘Silk’ which promises to make loading web pages lightning fast.
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The Kindle Fire is now available pretty much anywhere for pre-order on Amazon’s website.
Specifications:
- 1 GHz TI OMAP 4 (dual core)
- 7 inch IPS display
- 512MB RAM
- 8 GB Storage
- WiFi b/g/n
- 11.4mm thick
- 414g weight
