Amazon refreshes Kindle Fire as More Competition Looms

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Amazon has come back to the market with its second generation Kindle Fire as well as its lowered prices and enhanced the performance of existing Kindle models. Declaring that the company has decided to go big, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage today to introduce a pair of new Kindle Fire tablets called the Kindle Fire HD including an 8.9-inch device that caught many by surprise. There is also a 7-inch version.

The latest device appears to have something for everybody with enhanced e-mail that will appeal to business users, the ability to limit screen time that will make parents happy and a faster device and wireless capabilities that everyone will like.

The screen on the Kindle Fire HD has a 1920 x 1200 resolution and Amazon has eliminated the air gap in the new Laminated Touch Sensor display, a move that it said will eliminate glare by 25%. The tablet will be powered by a Texas Instruments 4470 OMAP processor.

The company has adopted a MIMO (multiple input-multiple output) dual antenna structure in the devices that help with providing a stronger, faster Wi-Fi signal, operating in the 5GHz band. A key advantages that even with the higher speeds it does not use additional battery power. Amazon said that this is 41% faster that the new iPad.

Additional hardware features a front facing camera and dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus. The storage will start at 16GB, with Amazon saying that 8GB, common in most rival offerings, just would not work with high definition.

There is a range of new software features including Whispersync for voice that enables you to listen to a book and then later start up reading where you were last listening. There is also a version for games so that you can continue on from where you stopped in a game.

For users that view movies on their tablets there is now a feature called X-Ray for Movies that was developed in a partnership with IMDB that allows you to freeze a scene and the app will tell you who is currently on screen. If needed it can go into a great deal of additional detail.

For the corporate user it has an enhanced e-mail that will enable a very tight integration with Microsoft Exchange. There is also a feature called Kindle FreeTime that lets you set screen time limits for kids with different settings for movies and reading.

The entry level price for the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD will be $199 while the 8.9-inch model will start at $299 and a 4G LTE version will have a $499 sticker price. The first model is expected in the next few weeks but the higher end models will not be available unit late November.

Another new offering from the company is its slim and light Kindle Paperwhite, a 7.5-ounch 9.1 mm thick e-reader that will include a front lit display with user changeable fonts and a higher resolution display. Its base price will be $119 while a 3G version will have a $179 price tag. The company reduced its Kindle from $199 to $159 with more memory and a faster processor, available on September 14.

The company first delivered the Kindle Fire last fall and it was one of the hottest products gifts of the holiday season, topping the sales charts at Amazon in its first weeks. However a bevy of competitors have darkened the sheen of the product. Amazon estimates that it now has 22% of the tablet market in the United States.

Barnes & Noble are fighting to get share with its Nook but the bigger competition has come from market leader Apple and its iPad lineup and newcomer Google with its Nexus 7 offering. In the near future we will see a host of tablets based on the two versions of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system

We are already seeing hardware OEM’s such as Lenovo, Acer, Asus and Hewlett-Packard release advance information about next generation tablets as well as new hardware developer Microsoft with its Surface platform. Intel claims that at least 20 tablets will be using its chips in future releases, and it is not the market leader in this space.

That is a reason why Apple’s and Samsung’s offerings cost significantly more; they are looking for profits off of their hardware. Amazon’s Bezos talked about how customers want services not gadgets and that hardware is a service. He noted that most of its rivals in the tablet space have failed because they do not realize this. He said that Amazon does not expect to make money from its hardware but from the content it sells. Despite this he claims that it is not a razor/razor blade situation. However there are dangers to this approach as pointed out here at CNBC.

Amazon has really raised the bar on features and performance with the Kindle Fire HD and it will be very interesting to see how the competition reacts. With Apple’s new iPad expected soon, it will probably be the first to face a drect comparison, followed by the Windows 8 tablets.