More Details About the Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet [video]

By Cheryl Lindo Jones
29 Sep, 2011 12:18 am

The Amazon Kindle announcement finished a while ago. Here are some more juicy details about the new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet:

7″ IPS display, Gorilla Glass screen, 1024 x 600
TI OMAP 4, dual-core processor
8 GB internal storage
ambient light sensor
414 g
11.4 mm thick

While the hardware is on the lower-end side to keep costs down, the software features built-in to the Kindle Fire are actually pretty interesting. Firstly, the main UI is a carousel of all of your content. As you can see, it’s very difficult to see that Android is running on the Kindle Fire:

As reported from This is My Next’s liveblog, scrolling through the carousel of content looked very fast. It sounds like the items will be sorted by date accessed, with most recent items at the top. You can pin favorite content to a shelf below the carousel. It looks like the section headings above the carousel allows you to filter what content is displayed in the carousel. At the very top is a search bar that searches locally, on Amazon, and the web. You’ll definitely need the search bar to find some of your media when you have so much of it that spinning through the carousel becomes too tedious, no matter how zippy its performance is. It remains to be seen whether the user can create folders or any other kind of hierarchy to make accessing your apps and other media more quickly. However, not all remnants of Android have been obliterated…the notifications tray that Android users are familiar with is still accessible from the top of the screen (but is heavily skinned), along with always present music playback controls, Wi-Fi settings, brightness controls, orientation lock toggle and other settings, which is nice.

Secondly, Kindle’s Whispersync feature that syncs your e-book reading progress across Kindle devices as well as bookmarks, notes, highlights, etc. will work with videos. You’ll be able to watch a video on the Kindle Fire, pick up where you left off on your TV or wherever else you choose to stream the Amazon video. This is similar to watching a Netflix video on your mobile device, then continuing it on your TV or computer.

Thirdly, Amazon has developed Amazon Silk, a part local, part Cloud-based browser. It uses Amazon’s EC2 servers to do the heavy lifting and manage all the connections needed to gather up all the web resources needed to load a single webpage. So instead of several connections to grab photos, banner ads, videos, Flash elements, etc., the Kindle Fire only needs to maintain one connection to the EC2 cloud to get the optimized page. Optimized mobile browsers aren’t a new concept. Opera Mobile is a very popular server-based browser. However, Amazon’s approach is definitely different. If you’re interested in more technical details, check out this video:

Speaking of cloud computing, the Kindle Fire’s content will always be backed up, meaning you can delete any of it — apps, movies, books, magazines, documents — and redownload it from your own private stash of cloud storage. Backing up your data is seamless, and happens without your intervention.

While the Kindle Fire may not be the uber-Android tablet that some users demand, I think the users who like a device similar to the Barnes and Noble NOOK Color, will be quite pleased. And actually, now it’s on Barnes and Noble to make the NOOK Color 2.0 either pretty impressive, or pretty cheap to compete with Amazon. The Kindle Fire will be available on November 15, but Jeff Bezos encourages interested buyers to pre-order now.

Here’s the Kindle Fire commercial shown at the announcement: