Remember the invites sent out last week by Amazon for a special press vent held on September 28th? Well, now it has become official: they’ll unveil the Amazon tablet dubbed Kindle Fire. The event will take place in New York City and the name “Fire” is meant to set apart the slate from the e-Ink Kindle models.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will be present on stage to unveil the device, that will ship in the second week of November, according to recent info. The tablet will be a 7 inch backlit model very similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook, according to people close to the situation. Kindle Fire was built by the same company that built the PlayBook, Quanta, so that’s the cause of the resemblance.
It seems Amazon is hoping to capitalize massively on the upcoming holiday season and sell quite a bunch of these units. People who have already played with the Kindle Fire ensure us that the device is extraordinary and that its software is better than the PlayBook’s, plus the content is a lot better. Amazon included as OS its own customized version of Android and its very own Android Appstore.
The retailer will also be providing TV shows and movies via its streaming video service, that will be very available and handy on the tablet. Amazon’s MP3 service and bookstore will also have a vital role on the Fire, we’re told. As far as hardware goes, we’ll see a TI dual core OMAP chipset, probably at 1.2GHz. With a $250 price tag and all of these hot features, I’d be surprised if the Kindle Fire didn’t sell millions of units this year.
