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The Amazon Kindle Fire has already become a tablet to be reckoned with since its introduction on Sept. 28. In just one month (Sept. 28-Oct. 28) Amazon is rumored to have collected 500,000 pre-orders for the new tablet, with possibly another million or more pre-sales made through retail partners such as Target, Walmart, and Best Buy. What makes the Kindle Fire so popular? How does it compare with other tablets on the market? Here's the low-down. The 5 Best Features Price-- Price is undoubtedly the most attractive feature. At $199, the Kindle Fire is less than half the price of most other tablets; its nearest cost competitor is the Nook Tablet from Barnes & Noble at $249. To achieve this cost advantage, Amazon has likely adopted a loss-leader strategy and priced its tablet below cost, anticipating that it will create more sales for Amazon down the line. In addition, the device forgoes many of the frills offered by other tablets. For example, it has no camera/video, no GPS, no microphone, and no Bluetooth or 3G wireless connectivity. (More on that below.) Portability -- The 7-in. touchscreen makes the Kindle Fire more portable than larger tablets such as Apple's iPad2 and HP's TouchPad. The whole tablet is less than half an inch thick and slightly smaller than a mid-sized paperback book in width and height. It weighs just 14.6 oz. Of course, size is a classic Goldilocks dilemma when it comes to tablets. Too big, too small, and just right depend on how you use it. If you do mostly Web browsing, then a 7-in. screen is usually too small for the typical Web page. You'd be doing a lot of scrolling around. But if you like to watch streaming video or movies, play games, listen to music, or read an e-book, then a 7-in. screen is usually just right. The device is clearly designed as a portable content-delivery device, particularly for Amazon content (but not exclusively). The 7-in., 1024 x 600-pixel display works well for streamed or downloaded visual media and delivers crisp, bright, vibrant images. Seamless Access to Amazon Portal -- When you order the Kindle Fire from Amazon's online store, it will be delivered with pre-links to all your favorite Amazon accounts, such as Apps, Games, Kindle eBooks, Cloud Player and Kindle Prime. The media can be bought or rented and then streamed or downloaded to the tablet from the vast server farms of Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you have other devices for streaming media, Amazon's Whispersync technology keeps them all synchronized with the tablet. For example, if you stop watching a movie on the Kindle Fire, and later you want to start watching it again on your MacBook, Whispersync saves your place so you can pick up where you left off whenever you reconnect to the Web. Amazon also provides 5 GB of free Cloud storage, which helps compensate for the meager 8-GB of onboard storage. (More on that below.) In addition to Amazon's ginormous library of more than 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, and magazines, the Kindle Fire also provides seamless access to many other sources of content such as Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio. Simplicity -- Amazon has done a great job with the user interface (UI). The home screen is intuitively graphical, consisting of two virtual bookshelves with media icons arrayed on them. The upper, larger bookshelf, called the "carousel," contains icons that are stacked chronologically with the last-used item on top. The lower, smaller shelf is designed to hold your favorites. In one stroke, Amazon's bookshelf UI pays homage to its bookstore roots while also demonstrating a flair for form and function once found only in Apple products. Innovative 'Silk' Web Browser-- Perhaps the most innovative feature is the Web browser. Unlike standard browsers, Amazon's "Silk" browser does not compose a requested page locally. Instead, the high-speed AWS Cloud server caches the page first, then sends it to the tablet in one stream of code. The result is a split browser system that resides both on the tablet and in the server cloud. The division of labor enables web pages to download faster than with typical Android devices. According to Amazon, the servers also adapt to your browsing habits, so the process gets faster over time. Kindle Fire vs. Other Tablets Much has been said about the Kindle Fire vs. the Apple iPad2. Let's be clear: Apple has nothing to worry about. The two tablets are not really comparable in any meaningful way. In fact, Amazon has created its own genre of tablet, which makes it a little awkward to draw straight comparisons with other devices. Amazon has also created its own closed-platform version of Google's Android OS, so even comparing the Kindle Fire with other Android tablets is tricky. Nevertheless, it is useful to list the specs of other popular tablets just to see how the Amazon Kindle Fire stacks up against them. This Author is a huge fan of Kindle Fire
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