Amazon Kindles Fire under tablet market

This week, Amazon unveiled their first foray into the tablet market with their new full colour, 7 inch Kindle Fire. The launch immediately ignited debate as to whether the Fire constituted a credible threat to Apple’s dominance in the market, primarily because of the pocket friendly $199 price tag, a fraction of the iPad’s which starts at an eye-watering-by-comparison $499. And while the debate rages on, the general consensus thus far seems to be; Apple needn’t lose too much sleep, but everyone else should sit up and take note.

Running a modified Android OS, the Fire will be able to access all of Amazon’s considerable online offerings via wifi (crucially however, no 3G as yet) including movies and TV shows, music downloads and the millions of books and magazines available from the Kindle store. Angry Birds fans are catered for via the well stocked Android App store and the Fire features ultra fast web browsing thanks to the new Amazon Silk web browser.

With just 8GB of on board storage, the Fire will heavily utilise Amazon’s cloud storage facilities to host all your content for free, no mean feat considering the wealth on offer. Amazon has also eschewed the other expensive components of larger tablets such as embedded cameras and mics in favour of a more streamlined experience, no doubt instrumental in reaching that all important price tag which could prove so disruptive to the tablet market.

So the price may be right, the content is all present and correct and the overall package looks slick and appealing, but will the lack of all important 3G connectivity prove to be the plucky pretender’s undoing? Surely to get the best use out of all that cloud based content and processing power users will want to be able to get at it on the go? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.