The Amazon Kindle Fire has been much talked about because Amazon is taking a “good enough” approach to competing with established tablet players like Samsung or Apple. Many prospect Kindle Fire buyers would not spend $300 or more to get a high-end tablet, so Amazon is not really trying to steal share, but it tries to make the tablet market bigger, faster.

1GHz Dual-core TI OMAP SoC (same as the Playbook)
512MB RAM
8GB of storage (no microSD)
WIFI 2.4GHz B/G/N
No 3G, no Bluetooth

First, I’m glad that Amazon chose the dual-core OMAP processor. It worked great on the Blackberry Playbook, and this is certainly a good choice. 512MB of RAM is not a lot, but probably good enough if there aren’t too many background apps, and I think that it will suffice for the Kindle Fire’s purpose.

The 8GB of storage may be more problematic, especially for those who are interested in video. Although that’s plenty for books and alright for photos, local video files can consume space much quicker and this could be an issue down the road. Actually, a regular mix of Music, Photos and Videos could strain the storage capacity quickly. Granted, it’s also a “cloud device” that can stream stuff from the web, but there are cases where you don’t have access to the network.

Labels: Apple, samsung, tablet