The Kindle Fire Is Smoking

The reaction to Amazon's Kindle Fire is now reaching a fever pitch. At an unbelievable price of $199, the new tablet from Amazon is $300 less than the price of a basic Apple iPad2, and $50 below the price tag of a Barnes and Noble Nook. Amazon's unveiling of the Kindle Fire has been met with an extremely warm reception. Here are some of the Fire's terrific features:

1. A Browser called Amazon Silk.

The Kindle Fire employs a super fast browser called Amazon Silk. It not only gives you access to Amazon's voluminous inventory of movies, music, and books, but you can travel anywhere you want on the internet highway by way of Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. It includes Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and Pandora. Over 15,000 apps and games are available for the Kindle Fire. An interface that is easy to use, plus its feather weight of less than one pound makes reading a book, magazines, and e-mails a comfortable and pleasurable experience.

2. An Impressively Vivid Display Screen

The multi-touch display screen is gorilla glass, and is made by Corning. Gorilla glass is thirty times more resilient than plastic, and resists scratches, scrapes, and bumps. The Kindle Fire has a seven-inch IPS LCD anti-glare display screen. The wide angle reduces side distortion when viewed by more than one person. With a screen resolution of 1024x600 and 169 screen pixels jammed in per inch it has an incredible range of sixteen million vivid colors. Watching movies on that screen will be a joy.

3. It has some Power

The Kindle Fire is powered with a dual-core processor. The 8GB storage capacity can hold as many as six thousand books, or eight hundred songs, or ten movies, or eighty apps. If you are looking for more storage area, then Amazon's EC2 system is the place to go. EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. You can receive unlimited, absolutely free cloud storage backup from Amazon when you make content purchases from Amazon, and they will throw in, also free, another five-giga bytes of storage for other personal content. The tablet battery should last eight hours if you are doing some reading, and between seven and eight if you are watching movies. Fully recharging the battery using a power adapter will take about four hours, or connect it to your computer with a USB.

4. Light in Weight and Light on the Wallet

While looking at the Nook vs Kindle, a $199 price tag on the Kindle Fire and releasing it 40 days before the Holiday's is pure genius. The Kindle Fire does not include a camera or GPS, but I can live without those on my tablet. Cutting those items to reach the $199 price bracket was well worth it.