Kindle Fire

The Kindle Fire is a mini tablet computer version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. Announced on September 28, 2011, the Kindle Fire has a color 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS technology and runs a forked version of Google's Androidoperating system. The device—which includes access to the Amazon Appstore, streaming movies and TV shows, and Kindle's e-books—was released to consumers in the United States on November 15, 2011. On September 7, 2012, upgrades to the device were announced with consumer availability to those European countries with a localized version of Amazon's website (United Kingdom,^[8] France, Germany, Italy andSpain).^[9]

The Kindle Fire's external dimensions are 7.5×4.7×0.45 inch (190×120×11 mm),^[10]. The visible area of the screen is 6×3.5 inches (150×89 mm). The Kindle Fire retails for US$199.^[11] Estimates of the device's initial bill of materials ranged from $150 to $201.70.^[12][13] Amazon's business strategy is to make money on the selling of digital content on the Fire, rather than through the device itself.^[14][15][16] On September 6, 2012, the Kindle Fire price was reduced to $159, RAM upgraded to 1GB and processor clock speed upgraded to 1.2GHz. A new and more video-friendly version called theKindle Fire HD was also announced, to be on sale on September 14 (7 inch version).^[17]

As of October 2012, the Kindle Fire is the second-best-selling tablet after Apple's iPad, with about 7 million units sold according to estimates by Forrester Research.^[2]

Hardware

Most Kindle Fire devices employ a 1-GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 dual-core processor. The device has a multi-touch color screen with a diagonal length of 7 inches (180 mm) and a 600×1024-pixel resolution (160 dpi density). Connectivity is through802.11n Wi-Fi and USB 2.0 (Micro-B connector). The device includes 8 GB of internal storage — said to be enough for 80 applications, plus either 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books.^[18][19] According to Amazon's list of technical details, the Kindle Fire's 4400 mAh battery sustains up to 8 hours of consecutive reading and up to 7.5 hours of video playback with wireless off.^[20].

Of the 8GB internal storage, approximately 6.5GB is available for content.^[21]

Software

The first generation of Kindle Fire devices run a customized Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS.^[22]. The second generation devices run a customized Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS.^[23] Along with access to Amazon Appstore,^[6](the appstore service is only for US customers) the Fire includes a cloud-accelerated "split browser", Amazon Silk, using Amazon EC2 for off-device cloud computation; including webpage layout and rendering, and Google's SPDY protocol for faster webpage content transmission.^[24][25][26] The user's Amazon digital content is given free storage inAmazon Cloud's web-storage platform,^[6] 5GB Music storage in Amazon Cloud Drive, and a built-in email application allows webmail (Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL Mail, etc.) to be merged into one inbox.^[6] The subscription-based Amazon Prime, which includes unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows, is available with a free trial period.^[6] The current version of the Kindle Fire OS as of May 3, 2012 is 6.3.1_user_4107720.^[27]

Content formats supported are Kindle Format 8 (KF8), Kindle Mobi (.azw), TXT, PDF, unrestricted MOBI, PRC natively, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, non-DRM AAC, MP3, MIDI, OGG, WAV, MP4, VP8.^[6]

Because of Amazon's USB driver implementation, the Kindle Fire suffers from slow USB transfer speeds. For example, transferring an 800MB video file may take more than three minutes.^[28]