November 15, 2011, is the hotly-anticipated release date for the all-new Kindle Fire tablet from online retail giant Amazon.com. According to Amazon, “orders are prioritized on a first come, first served basis”. You can pre-order now for a price of $199.00 ( Free Super Saver Shipping ), and “reserve your place in line”.
Kindle Fire recorded more than 95,000 pre-orders on the first day, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said that they expect to ship “millions” of the devices when the tablet ships on November 15, 2011. The Kindle Fire is priced at a very affordable $199, cheaper than comparable tablet products.
Here’s a review of the Fire’s most notable features, benefits and specs. Hope you find it useful.
- View “glossy” magazines
The main selling point of the Kindle Fire may be the sheer amount of content available for users. For example, in support of the Kindle Fire, Amazon recently concluded content agreements with several prominent magazine publishers such as Conde-Nast, Meredith Corp and Hearst Corp to bring their publications to the device. The magazines you can view on the Kindle Fire complete with full-color photographs and layouts include Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, GQ, Oprah, Wired and Martha Stewart Living. And some titles feature special editions that include interactive features such as built-in video and audio. For comic book readers, Amazon has also concluded a deal with DC Comics to bring 100 original graphic novels to the Kindle Fire, including acclaimed titles such as Watchmen, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Blackest Night, The Sandman and Y: the Last Man.
- Free download content & illustrated kid’s books
The Kindle Store offers more than a million books that you can download straight to the Kindle Fire, with some 80% of them available for less than $10, as well as more than two million public-domain books that you can download for free, including classics such as Treasure Island and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In addition, you can use the Kindle Fire to download free e-books from sites such as Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive which offer access to public collections. In addition, the Kindle Fire is ideal for displaying heavily-illustrated children’s books, and more than 1,000 of them are available from the Kindle Store including Curious George and Brown Bear.
- Back up your songs on the cloud
The Amazon MP3 store offers more than 17 million songs that you can stream or download on your Kindle Fire. All songs that you buy from the MP3 store are stored for free on Amazon Cloud Drive and not counted against your storage space. And once you back up your songs on the cloud, you can listen to them not only on your Kindle Fire but also on any web-enabled computer using Amazon Cloud Player.
- Download apps & games
Of course, you can also download apps from the Amazon Appstore for Android, which includes popular games such as Plants vs. Zombies and Angry Birds. And you are entitled to download a paid app for free daily.
Impressive Specs
- Beautiful colors
The tablet features a seven-inch screen with in-plane switching technology that gives the display a wider viewing angle and outstanding color reproduction with sixteen million colors as well as 1024×600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi, making it ideal for sharing with others.
- Light as a feather
The Kindle Fire weighs just 14.6 oz with compact measurements of 7.5-inches by 4.7-inches by 0.45-inches, making it easy to take with you in your pocket or bag and then whip out when you want to use it. The tablet can easily be held in one hand while the intuitive touch screen interface allows you to easily find your favorite content. The screen is made of highly-durable Gorilla Glass that resists scratches and other damage without adding to the weight of the device.
- Monster hard drive
The Kindle Fire’s internal storage space is 8GB, which is enough to store 6,000 books, 800 songs, ten movies or eighty apps. However, the tablet is designed to take advantage of the Amazon Cloud Drive to increase its capacity, since you can upload your content from the Kindle Fire to the Cloud using your Amazon account and securely store it there, allowing you to download it from the device and access it later on the Fire or other web-connected device. Cloud Drive gives you 5GB of free storage space, with paid storage plans giving you as much as 1,000GB of storage space. Supported formats for the Kindle Fire include AZW (Kindle), MP3, MP4, JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, Audible (Audible Enhanced AA and AAX), MIDI and WAV.
- Sync your content
The Whispersync technology allows you to sync your content from the Kindle Fire to your other digital devices. For example, Whispersync allows you to synchronize the bookmarks and furthest pages read on your e-books among different Kindles registered to the same account. And for Kindle Fire, the Whispersync technology allows you to keep track of your location in a video so that you can resume watching at the point where you left off on PC, Mac as well as other devices such as compatible TVs and Blu-Ray players. The Kindle Fire comes bundled with a free one-month subscription to Amazon Prime, that entitles you to free two-day shipping on millions of selected items as well as unlimited instant streaming of more than 10,000 movies and episodes of popular TV shows; normal subscription rates are $80 a year.
- Ultra-fast web browsing
The Kindle Fire has a dual-core processor that gives you powerful and fast performance, allowing you to simultaneously perform several memory-intensive tasks such as surfing the web and downloading videos or streaming music without causing the device to slow down. The Kindle Fire comes pre-installed with the Amazon Silk cloud-accelerated “split browser” that pushes some of the computation onto the Amazon Web Services Cloud to provide you with an ultra-fast web browsing experience. The battery provides you with up to eight hours of reading or 7.5 hours of video watching with the wireless turned off, although battery life can vary depending on usage. However, the battery can be fully charged in four hours using the included power adapter or from your computer via USB.
- Keep on top of your webmail
The Kindle Fire also has an e-mail app that allows you to integrate your webmail from different accounts (Google, Yahoo, et al) into a single inbox as well as importing your contact lists and messages from other e-mail accounts. You can even use the Kindle Fire for work since you can e-mail documents directly to the device so that you can read them at your convenience using the document viewer. Supported formats for documents include Office 2007 and 2003,TXT, DOC, DOCX and PDF.
- Overall rating: 9/10
As you can see, the Amazon Kindle Fire has a lot to offer. It is the ideal tablet computer for users who want to enjoy a virtually unlimited amount of content on the go. And at the generous price of $199, it’s no surprise Amazon have been flooded with pre-orders. Click here to order yours now.
