Amazon Launches the Kindle Fire Tablet Which Retails for $199

Posted on September 28, 2011

Today Amazon.com launched its new tablet called the Kindle Fire. The tablet has an unbelievably low price of $199. The device is linked with the Kindle store, and has a browser called Silk. It doesn't have a camera, but for $199, who cares? The 7-inch touchscreen is made of gorilla glass, so it will be durable. It has built in Wi-Fi, but not 3G like the Kindle. The low price has sent shockwaves through the industry today: clearly Jeff Bezos is really serious about taking on the iPad, which start at $499.

You can read books, watch tv, watch movies and surf the web. There is an App store. The storage is 8 GB, but it stores much more than with free Cloud storage. You can delete books, and bring them back later from the Cloud.

The Wall Street Journal talked with Amazon content boss Russ Grandinetti at the launch event today in New York. Russ and his team run the Kindle bookstore. Russ says the Kindle Fire runs Flash, unlike the iPad so you can watch videos on Hulu and Netflix. Here he talks about how you use the Kindle Fire and about what the browser can do. He also talks a bit about the pricing for ebooks and the dispute between publishers (who want to set the price of ebooks) and Amazon.com who wants to set the book prices itself. Take a look: