Even before Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire reader tablet at a packed New York press conference Wednesday morning, the market for tablets appeared to be on fire. Practically every tech manufacturer under the sun had brought one out.Truth is, only Apple's iPad has been a piping-hot best seller, dousing the tablet dreams of companies ranging from Research In Motion to Hewlett-Packard.
On the surface, the outlook for Fire would appear rosier, although we'll know more when the tablet starts shipping on Nov. 15.


For starters, playing with Fire will only cost $199, compared with the starting iPad at $499. The 14.6-ounce Fire has a fast dual-core processor, and a protective 7-inch Gorilla Glass display capable of showing off 16 million colors. I'll reserve judgment until getting a chance to play with it, but the carousel interface looks good and appears simple to use.
Fire only has a modest 8 GB of storage, but all the content -- books, movies, TV shows, magazine and apps -- will be stored and backed up in the cloud for free, an area of obvious emphasis for Amazon. (I'm waiting on details of how much you can store online gratis.) Fire has a "split browser" called Silk that is engineered to work well on the physical tablet and in the cloud.
On its market-leading Kindle electronic readers, Amazon has had a feature known as Whispersync, which lets you keep your progress inside a book in sync as you read across other Kindles, smartphones, computers and on the Web.
With Fire, Amazon adds Whispersync to movies and TV shows, meaning you can start watching a flick on the tablet, and finish on a large-screen TV, potentially a killer application. Amazon has been pushing its Prime service that includes instant streaming of movies.
"Syncing should be done invisibly, wirelessly in the background and it should actually work," Bezos said during the press conference.
While the headline news is the new tablet, Amazon also announced two new touch Kindles, coming Nov. 21 for $99 (without 3G connectivity) and $149 (with 3G). And it lowered the price of the latest-generation, sub-6-ounce non-touch Kindle to $79, which ships today (Bezos said that not all users want a touch device.)
Amazon unveiled a promising new Kindle feature called X-Ray which lets readers explore "the bones of the book" by learning more about fictional characters and historical places.
I suspect Amazon will sell a lot of Kindles at those prices, and agree with Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps who expects "Amazon to sell millions of tablets" as well. "The rapid-fire adoption of the Fire will give app developers a reason -- finally -- to develop Amazon tablet apps," Epps opines. She adds that she thinks "Amazon will be a strong number two (to Apple), and we expect no other serious tablet competitors until Windows 8 tablets launch."
The Fire tablet, at least at the outset, is Wi-Fi only.
Before exiting the press conference, Bezos tried to close the sale. "We're making many millions of these," he said, "but I suggest you order one today."
Bharat Reviewed by Bharat on . Amazon announces Kindle Fire tablet for $199 http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/technology-live/2011/09/28/firex-wide-community.jpg Even before Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire reader tablet at a packed New York press conference Wednesday morning, the market for tablets appeared to be on fire. Practically every tech manufacturer under the sun had brought one out.Truth is, only Apple's iPad has been a piping-hot best seller, dousing the tablet dreams of companies ranging from Research In Motion to Rating: 5