Nathan Campos

After the mighty success of its Kindle e-readers, Amazon has previously announced its new tablet: the Amazon Kindle Fire. Based off of a heavily modified version of Android, this new tablet will not only have e-books but also movies, magazines, TV shows, songs, and apps. It will be released on November 15 of this year for the small price of $199 compared to the iPad's $500+ dollar price tag. What will come of this new tablet? Does it have the ability to overtake the iPad as the prominent tablet? Allow me to weigh in my thoughts and review this exciting development.

Based on pre-release purchases, the Kindle Fire could outsell the iPad in first month sales. This may be influenced by the staggeringly lower cost. The Kindle Fire will also have access to Amazon's leading cloud storage for no extra cost, allowing you to store your content in the cloud. You have the cloud storage in addition to the 8GB hard drive built into the Fire which only really serves to store non-Amazon content with everything else being hosted freely.

Secondly, there comes the matter of apps and other programs. The Apple app store is too closed and the Android store is too open. The Amazon app store hopes to solve these problems by remaining an open platform like the Android store but only making the best apps available. Since the Fire is running a modified version of Android, there won't be a giant learning curve to writing apps for it. As for specific apps, you will be able to get Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix. Streaming content will most likely end up being a huge part of the Fire's usage.

The Kindle Fire that will be released in November will only have a 7-inch screen, about two inches smaller than the iPad's, but in early 2012 Amazon will reportedly release a version with a 10-inch screen. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, stated that people should not see the Fire as a standalone device, rather part of an integrated media service. "That's why the Kindle has been successful," he says.

The Fire is introducing a new style of web browser: a split browser. Dubbed "Silk" because that substance is almost invisible yet really strong, the Fire takes advantage of Amazon's powerful data centers to process and fetch parts of pages before sending them to the client. By utilizing caching and this split browsing, the Silk browser on the Kindle Fire will be able to run much faster and efficiently.

A purchase of the device will give you free access to Amazon Prime for a year. This service provides faster, cheaper shipping on many items, but it also provides free video streaming, a major feature of the Fire.

In conclusion, the Amazon Fire seems to be a strong contender in the tablet market with many features which set it apart from the crowd. Only time can tell which will remain victorious.

This article was imported from my old blog . Some things may be broken.