Amazon has finally revealed its hotly anticipated iPad competitor, today launching the Kindle Fire and using the opportunity to take a swipe at the premium price of Apple’s products.
The Kindle Fire will retail for just $199, and will give users access to a wide range of features, including movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games and web browsing.
In its release information Amazon said there are two types of companies: “those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.”
It said the Kindle Fire delivers everything the company has been working on for 15 years, into a “single, fully-integrated experience for customers.”
The tablet features a vibrant colour IPS touchscreen with an extra-wide viewing angle, weighs just 413 grams, and runs on a state-of-the-art dual core processor. Amazon will also give users access to free storage in the Amazon Cloud.
“We are building premium products and offering them at non-premium prices,” the company said.
The Fire also features Amazon Silk, a cloud-accelerated web browser that utilises a “split browser” architecture to leverage the computing speed and power of the cloud, and it supports Adobe Flash Player.
For business users, the Fire promises to make it easy to take documents on the go, and read them in Word, PDF and a range of other formats. Its built-in email app allows users to sync their webmail accounts in a single inbox as well as import messages and contact lists from other email accounts.
