So, Amazon let the cat out of the bag this morning and announced its low-cost and full-color seven inch tablet, Kindle Fire (and a less relevant-to-our-interests new touch-centric Kindle). Fire is an Android-powered device, though you wouldn’t recognize that fact from its UI alone. It’ll hook into Amazon’s cloud, be able to stream Amazon movies from its download service and, just like the Kindle, connect with Amazon’s rich e-books store, but the one thing that really caught our attention was, of course, the promise of games.
At the press event held today, Amazon’s demo Kindle Fire had a pre-loaded icon for Angry Birds, heavily suggesting that Rovio Mobile’s property will debut with yet another tablet computer this year. After the event, Amazon opened up its Kindle Fire advertisement page, displaying Angry Birds Rio, Plants vs. Zombies, Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump, and even Peggle on the device. That page states that every app that touches the device will be “Amazon tested on Kindle Fire for the best experience possible.” The Fire has a 16-million color display, a resolution of 169 pixels per inch, and it runs on a dual-core CPU. No camera or 3G, though.
Fire will hit this November 15 at $199 — a price that, if the device turns out to be good, gives potential owners a legitimate low-cost option to play Android games. This is an opportunity we haven’t really seen yet from an actual company with chops in the tablet space (excluding the HP Touchpad ridiculousness), so we’ll definitely keep our eyes on Fire as it grows and hopefully becomes the iOS-y platform that Amazon wants it to be. Also, it plays Angry Birds, guys! Whoo!
