Alas, we haven’t been capable of get our hands on Amazon’s diminutive new 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire tablet just yet, but we were treated to a lengthy demo of the item courtesy of an Amazon rep, answering a lot of our questions and showing us just what how the article performs. How does it fare? Rather well, thanks greatly. More details after the break.
The reports we’d heard of the Kindle Fire being very like the BlackBerry PlayBook , and you may certainly put any doubt you had about that to rest. The article is incredibly clearly on the topic of RIM’s hardware, and that is the reason not necessarily a foul thing. We liked the PlayBook hardware, and while we have not yet had the chance to the touch a Kindle Fire, we presume it’ll have an analogous quality feel.
What it do not have, though, is the choice of physical inputs. It will make do with only a power button and nothing more — which will turn down the quantity you have to to dive into the status bar. Even if that proves to be an annoyance within the long-run continues to be seen, but we’re thinking it’ll be.
Software performance seems quite smart at this point, switching tasks and switching between apps in rapid fire through the demo we got. We were only given a quick glimpse of the brand new Silk browser, but we must say the article appears to deliver on its promises. The twin-core 1GHz processor certainly seems adequate, whether or not it’s only paired with 512MB of memory. It also has 8GB of storage on tap — a touch light in this day and age, but with all of your content synced online, in theory there is not any need for more. In theory.
Ultimately the hearth is calling like a pleasant little device, and at $199 it may be a decidedly better choice than the Nook Color. Will it’s? Well, we’ll discover sometime before it ships in exactly under a month.
Video coming soon…
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