Kindle Fire Review

Kindle Fire, Full Color 7″ Multi-touch Display, Wi-Fi

Amazon quelled the rumours they were launching a new tablet with their recent announcement of the Kindle Fire. This 7 inch tablet features an impressive spec especially for its low price point at just under $200. With the Kindle Fire costing less than half the price of the iPad 2, Amazon looks set to weaken Apple’s domination of the tablet market.

So what can the Fire do? Besides being able to read e-Books and magazines, you can watch movies and tv shows, view picture galleries, run Android apps, listen to music and surf the internet on the new cloud accelerated browser – Amazon silk. Plus more besides!

Consumer Reviews

As a long-time Kindle fan I was eager to get my hands on a Fire. For the most part I've found that it does what I wanted it to, which is be the one device I can take with me anywhere. There are some great features; the reader app is excellent (though not without flaws), the app store experience is terrific, videos are fantastic, and the device is quick and for the most part dead-simple to use, all thanks to the services Amazon provides. And of course the extras that come with Prime membership really make it a real value - I won't be cancelling my Netflix streaming account just yet (watching Netflix on the Fire works very well) but I imagine within a year Amazon's free streaming video catalog will be just as good as Netflix. The free "lending library" book every month really is the icing on the cake though, and makes Prime membership a no-brainer. The hardware itself is solid and has a quality feel, it's just the right size for one-handed use, and the screen is fantastic (for an LCD screen) with good brightness and excellent color, and a very wide viewing angle. So as a reader, video player and music streaming device the Fire excels, and as an occasional browsing, emailing, game playing tablety thing it does pretty well.

Kindle Fire Features

- 7” Color Touchscreen

- Highly Durable Display

- Powered by High-speed Dual-core Processor

- Amazon Silk browser for High-speed Web Browsing

- Free Cloud Storage

Supported Formats

The Kindle Fire supports a wide range of media content formats. These include;

·  Audio: MP3, MIDI, WAV, OGG, AAC (non-DRM), Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)

·  Video: MPEG-4, VP8.

·  Text: Kindle (AZW), PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, PRC natively, unprotected MOBI.

·  Images: JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF.

Kindle Fire Specifications

- Display Size: 7″

- Display Type: IPS LCD multi-touch panel

- Display Resolution: 1024 x 600

- Size: 7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″

- Weight: 14.6 ounces

- Processor: 1GHz dual-core TI OMAP

- Storage: 8GB internal storage memory

- OS: Customized Android 2.3

- Battery Life (Wireless Off): 8 hrs reading or 7.5 hours video playback

- Battery Life (Wireless On): TBA

- Charging Time: Approximately 4 hours to fully charge via supplied U.S. power adapter

- USB: USB 2.0 (micro-B connector)

- Audio: 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack, plus top-mounted stereo speakers

- Native PDF Support: Yes

- Whispersync: Yes