AMAZON HAS unveiled a new multimedia tablet that could challenge Apple’s dominance in the market, but Irish users may have to wait a little longer to get their hands on it.
The Kindle Fire, a seven-inch touchscreen device, was announced at an event in New York yesterday. Amazon is accepting pre-orders for the Kindle Fire, which is due to go on sale on November 15th, but only US-based customers are able to sign up at present.
The lightweight tablet, priced at $199 (€147), uses a version of Google’s Android operating system but has been heavily modified.
Amazon has designed its own web browser, Amazon Silk, that it says will work faster because it is “cloud accelerated” – it uses Amazon Web Services to take some of the strain. It also supports Flash, a common component of websites.
“These are premium products at non-premium prices,” Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said. “We are going to sell millions of these.”
The Kindle Fire comes with 8GB of internal memory, a dual core processor and access to Amazon’s Cloud storage service, which allows users to store apps, games, books and video content from the web retailer.
It supports wifi internet access, but unlike other rival tablets it does not offer a 3G version. The tablet also leaves out the camera and microphone that allow other similar devices to be used for video calling through services such as Skype. The company’s Whispersync technology, which currently allows Kindle users to sync library, last page read, bookmarks and highlights across a range of devices, will also work with video content, Mr Bezos said.
Amazon has also announced a new lower priced version of its regular Kindle e-reader for $79.
