Tech Thursday – FIRE! Kindle Fire That Is…

Imagine it as an old west town, with tumble weeds blowing across a deserted street in the middle of town. Two figures stand in the middle, about 50 feet apart. On one side is the Apple iPad, sheriff of the town, on the other side, the new upstart Amazon's Kindle Fire. There's gonna be a shoot out!

Well, it won't be as dramatic as that I'm sure. But a lot of people in the media have been comparing this new tablet with the iPad, who, right now is the leader of the pack. I don't think the new Kindle will replace the iPad, but it will offer people an alternative who think the iPad is out of their reach price wise. And Amazon is going about things differently then the others. They have an already established store for content. Infrastructure that can support the device. So right away, it has a lot going for it to give it a chance to survive.

Here's the breakdown on the device. It's got a 7" display, if WiFi only, can play music, stream video and can run apps from Amazon's Android App store. The kicker is it's just $199. Not a bad little deal for this new device. The drawback is, the apps available are not a wide a variety as the iPad. There are some really excellent ones for Android, but Apple's App store, simply has more and a better quality. That's not just me saying it, NPR said so too!

The real big thing that Fire has over iPad is the new Silk browser. It's a smart intuitive piece of software that learns how you browse an anticipates what you are going to want, and caches the results on Amazon's cloud storage service and feeds these to the Fire in a easily digestible form for it's smaller and less powerful cpu, but from what some have said, you wouldn't even notice that. This is a real strength for the Fire. This is real cloud based computing.

All in all, I like what I have read and seen. And the price is right. I can say I would be happy with one of these. So Amazon, feel free to send me a demo unit. I'll send it back.. I promise.. when you release the next generation. Just sayin'.

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