Amazon "Kindle Fire" tablet to be announced on Wednesday
We have known for a while that Amazon has been building a tablet. We got a breakdown of what it looked and felt like, and we knew that the announcement was likely going to be Wednesday September 28th at a press event held by Amazon. Now, we know that it's all true, it's all happening, and the tablet will be called the Kindle Fire.
The word is that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos himself will show off the Kindle Fire on stage on Wednesday. The Fire will be a 7" tablet, as expected, and will be somewhere around $250-300 at launch. The expected launch date has been pushed up from late November to the second week of November according to TechCrunch. It also seems the rumors that the Amazon tablet looks a lot like the BlackBerry PlayBook has some reasoning behind it. According to a report on GDGT, Amazon outsourced the design of the tablet to the same company that BlackBerry used for the PlayBook. The company, Quanta, allowed Amazon to push out the tablet faster by using the same template as the PlayBook.
Unfortunately, this rush may mean that the Fire won't be as good as expected, although we're not sure how good anyone really expects this tablet to be. The Kindle Fire is not aimed at hardcore users, and although it will likely sell extremely well, it won't really be a competitor to the iPad or Android Honeycomb tablets on features. The Fire is designed to kill the Nook Color, and for that it doesn't need to be that powerful. It just needs to be cheap and well marketed. However, the rumor is that the tablet will feature a dual-core OMAP, so it should have some speed. It's more whether or not the custom UI that Amazon is building will be ready for November.
sources: TechCrunch and GDGT
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