Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

NEW YORK - Amazon.com on Wednesday unveiled its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet, which will be a key competitor for Apple's iPad when it goes on sale in mid-November.

our editor recommends

'Downton Abbey' Becomes Britain's Top-Selling DVD Box Set of All-Time on Amazon

4 Ways Amazon vs. Netflix is Good

Amazon Beats Google, Apple in Launching Cloud Music Storage Server

Amazon said the tablet will cost $199, less than the cheapest iPad, and described it as "the Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games and web browsing with all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync, Amazon’s new revolutionary cloud-accelerated Web browser, vibrant color touch screen and powerful dual-core processor."

The e-tailer unveiled the tablet and three other new Kindle models at a launch event in New York on Wednesday.

“Kindle Fire brings together all of the things we’ve been working on at Amazon for over 15 years into a single, fully-integrated service for customers," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. "We're offering premium products, and we're doing it at non-premium prices.”

The company said the Kindle Fire will offer more than 18 million pieces of content, including over 100,000 movies and TV shows from Amazon Instant Video, over 17,000,000 songs from Amazon MP3, over 1 million Kindle books, 100 exclusive graphic novels, including Watchmen, as well as Batman: Arkham City, Superman: Earth One, Green Lantern: Secret Origin and other DC Entertainment titles, hundreds of magazines and newspapers, and popular Android apps and games, such as Angry Birds.

"A purpose built device for media consumption that is priced well below the lowest priced iPad should be a key driver to adoption," said Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang after the new product announcement. "In addition, we believe another key benefit for Amazon could be increased e-commerce purchases of non-media goods. [Amazon] Prime was not bundled with the tablet, but users will get one month of Prime for free. As such, we believe part of the intent of this device is to drive Prime subscriber penetration."

Email: Georg.Szalai@thr.com
Twitter: @georgszalai