I'm Gina Smith

Amazon Kindle Fire: Its Dirty, Rotten Secret .... anewdomain.net with Gina Smith and John C. Dvorak

The last piece of 2011 on anewdomain.net comes via my old friend and one heckuva writer, Paul Bonner. Check it out.

Amazon Kindle Fire: Set It Free

By Paul Bonner

Photo Courtesy: Rob Willcox

What’s Amazon’s dirty little secret? Ask aNewDomain’s Paul Bonner.

GET THE WHOLE STORY

 

 

Great Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet coverage ... Burgess-style.

By now, you know I've left BYTE. I'll soon let you know my new post. But I do want to share the great coverage by Brian Burgess (who just left BYTE as its exec editor) on Steve Krause's groovyPost.com site.

Amazon Kindle Fire: The Tablet to Take on iPAD? BREAKING

Posted by Brian Burgess on Sep 28, 2011 

New York: Amazon today announced its long awaited tablet and three new Kindle devices. As expected, Amazon led the charge with its down and dirty pricing — these devices are priced to sell quickly and obviously targeted at holiday shoppers.

The Kindle Fire tablet costs just $199 — far less than the $499 iPad from Apple — and is a dual-core, color tablet, 7-inch display. It’s available for preorder now at Amazon, and will ship Nov. 15, Bezos said.

Priced as a loss leader, Amazon will likely recoup the losses via sales of books, video and music downloads, which Bezos said the tablet will support via its Whispersync technology. The Fire is lighter, too.

Amazon execs say they will make more than 100,000 movies and TV shows via Amazon Instant Video available for streaming, purchase, download or rent. KindleFire comes along with a month-long free subscription to Amazon’s Prime service, normally about $80 a month. Analysts told groovyPost reporters they expect Amazon to sell millions of devices if Amazon could arrive under $300 price point. So the race is on.

The Kindle Fire as yet does not work with 3G technology or include a camera or mic, but groovyPost expects Amazon’s larger tablet due Q1 to remedy that.

Here are the specs as reported by Amazon. We’ll be following this breaking story and providing analysis via groovyCast podcasting later today and here on groovyPost. Our news analysis team will bring you perspective in coming hours and days.

Ads by Google

Chromebooks are here.

google.com/chromebook

The laptop optimized for the web. Less loading. More surfing.

Kindle™ - Only $139

Amazon.com/kindle

All new: Smaller, lighter, faster. 50% better contrast. 950k+ titles

New Sony Tablets

store.sony.com/Tablets

Introducing Two New Tablets From Sony. Order Yours Today!

We know you can’t wait, so here are the specs Amazon has announced. The dual-core processor powering the Amazon Kindle Fire is notably missing from the spreadsheet. Our sources have told us NVidia Tegra2 was going to be at its heart, but Amazon says it has now opted for the 1GHz dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP processor. Watch our coverage of this breaking story. Are you going to buy one? Let us know.

Amazon Kindle Fire SPECS:

Price: Available now for pre-order at amazon.com

Display: Seven-inch color display uses in-plane switching technology, 1024 x 768 display, capable of showing 18 million colors.

Weight: 14.6 oz (for our international readers, that’s 413 grams)

No System Requirements: The Kindle Fire Tablet requires no computer.

Storage: Free cloud storage for any and all Amazon content, 8GB internal. The latter can fit about 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books, execs say.

Wifi Connectivity: The Kindle Fire tablet supports 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11g, 802.11n or the 802.1x standards. Support for WEP, WPA and WPA2 security is available. No support for ad-hoc (p20) Wifi as I noted above.

Content supported: Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, MOBI (unprotected), native PRC, Audible (told you, Leo Laporte!), DOC, DOC X, GIF, PNG, BMP, non DRM AAC, MP3 of course, plus other music file standards: MIDI, OGG, WAVE, MP4, VP8.

A one-year limited warranty is available.

Check out this video from TheWorldNewz of an Amazon rep showing the Kindle Fire close up.

About the author

Based in Pelican Rapids, MN, Brian Burgess is executive editor at groovyPost. Got an idea for a How To? Email it to Brian at [email protected].

Twitter | Google+ | More Posts