Amazon Kindle Fire- the cheap 7 inch multimedia tablet- prices and features

If you are in the market for a powerful, good-looking and fast tablet and you have a decent budget on your hands, your possibilities are countless, including such devices as the Apple iPad 2, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Asus Eee Pad Transformer or Toshiba Thrive.

However, if you want a decent slate, with good technical specs, a nice look, but you are on a tighter budget, you almost can’t find anything satisfying on the market right now. This status quo is set to change in less than two months, though, after Amazon has officially announced a couple of days ago the release of their first-ever high-end tablet, the Kindle Fire.

The Fire, while not being as powerful as some of the gadgets I named above, comes at a great price and in fact doesn’t sacrifice that much in terms of performance. In the following lines we will take a quick look at what does the Fire bring to the table and how it compares with some of its strongest competitors.

Design and build

Even though you can’t say that the Fire is highly original when it comes to its look, you can’t actually say that it’s ugly either. It pretty much lacks curves, but the lines are pretty straightforward and give the overall design a touch of elegance and class.

The new Kindle Fire is good-looking, decent in terms of performance and very affordable.

The all-black color scheme is itself pretty elegant and nice, while the product dimensions and weight are not ideal, but competitive nevertheless. The Fire weighs 14.6 ounces (413 grams), which is an ounce over HTC Flyer’s weight, but is a little under what the Galaxy Tab 7 and the Acer Iconia Tab A100 go for. The exact dimensions of the Fire are 7.5 x 4.7 x 0.45 inches, which is about what you will get from other 7-inch tablets as well.

Screen, hardware and performance

The Fire features a 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS technology, anti-reflective treatment and 1024 x 600 pixels resolution. This is extremely nice in terms of viewing angles, but should do a pretty good job when it comes to colors and brightness as well.

In terms of hardware, the Fire is not exactly on-par with some of the other 7-inch tablets on the market, but is satisfactory nevertheless. Amazon’s new gadget is powered by a 1 GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4 processor with 512 MB of RAM and comes with 8 GB of internal storage space.

Software, battery life and others

While in terms of hardware the Kindle Fire is only a satisfactory device, when it comes to the software this is a great product. The 7-incher runs a modified and customized version of Android 2.3 and the number of integrated apps is almost overwhelming. You have access to books, games, multimedia content and all kinds of nice and useful apps. Furthermore, if you though that the poor internal storage space will give you headaches, you should think again, because you have unlimited cloud storage for all Amazon content.

The Fire comes with an ultra fast Silk cloud-accelerated browser, which should provide the snappiest internet experience available, but also with some nice and original apps, as the built-in email app that allows you to get all your webmail from different providers into a single inbox.

In terms of battery life, the Fire should provide an autonomy of about seven or eight hours and when it comes to other features, connectivity and ports you should know that the 7-incher only features WiFi, stereo speakers and a headphone jack.

The price is clearly Fire's number one strong point.

Pricing and availability

The Kindle Fire is already up for pre-orders on Amazon.com, but it will only start shipping in mid-November. The price is great and, if you ask me, it is the best deal you can get right now on the tablet market. The Fire is therefore available for 199 bucks, but will only sell in the United States for the time being.

Competition

We have already said a couple of words about how the Fire compares with some of its competitors in terms of design. When it comes to the hardware, Amazon’s product is pretty much on-par with the Galaxy Tab 7, featuring a 1 GHz A8 Cortex processor with 1 GB of RAM, the HTC Flyer, powered by a 1.5 GHz single-core processor with 1 GB of RAM, but slightly inferior than the Iconia Tab A100, which features an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor with 1 GB of memory.

In terms of connectivity and ports, the Kindle Fire is easily surpassed by most of its 7-inch competitors, while when it comes to software Amazon’s tablet is clearly better than the Galaxy Tab 7, but can’t compare with the Iconia Tab A100 running Android Honeycomb.

As for the pricing, the Fire is by far the most affordable 7-incher out there, going for 100 bucks less than the Galaxy Tab 7 and almost 130 dollars under Iconia Tab A100’s price.

Wrap-up

While the Amazon Kindle Fire can’t be considered as serious competition for the iPad 2 or other very strong and fast tablets available on the market right now, it will most likely attract great attention due to its very competitive price and large number of pre-loaded and available apps.

The Fire is definitely not an ‘’iPad killer’’, with decent, but not impressive technical specifications and it is after all a 7-inch tablet, which for some of you may be too little. On the other hand, it could be the perfect device for those of you who look for the best quality-price ratio.

If you would like to take a closer look at Kindle Fire’s features and specs, you can check out this video preview right here:

Tags: 7 inch tablets, Amazon, cheap tablets, Kindle, Kindle tablet