Amazon Kindle Fire unveiled with a $199 price tag

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Amazon Kindle Fire unveiled with a $199 price tag

Amazon held their big tablet unveiling event this morning, launching the Amazon Kindle Fire, their first true tablet device and the Kindle Touch, a smaller, touchscreen version of the popular Kindle ebook reader. We’ve already covered many of the leaked features of the Fire, but the big surprise was the price. $199. Oh, the tablet wars are ON.

For $199, the Fire is a 7” tablet that runs a highly modified version of Android, with the Amazon App Store built in, but you don’t get cameras or a mic for that price, and there’s only a WiFi version at present, but whatevs. Buying a Fire does get you a 30 day trial of Amazon Prime, but so does just going to Amazon and signing up.

In addition to just being a tablet, all of your books and movies on the device can be hosted on Amazon’s cloud service, so they don’t take up any room on your tablet and can be deleted and retrieved at any time. They’ve also unveiled an innovative web browser called Silk that renders web pages in the Amazon cloud before they’re pushed to the Fire so that all you see are instant websites. Pretty cool.

Amazon also unveiled Whispersync, so that you can start your movies or TV shows or music or books on the Fire or on your laptop and it will allow you to pick up exactly where you left off. So say you’re watching a TV show on the Fire on the train, you can get home and pick it up exactly where it was on your computer.

The tablet’s 7” long with a Gorilla Glass coating, a dual-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and a chassis that weighs 14.6 ounces.

Preorders for the Fire start today, but it doesn’t start shipping until November 15.