The Kindle Fire is the latest addition to the tablet computer market and seems to be aimed at owners of the popular e-book reader who are looking for something less limited than the old kindle but are not willing to shell out at least $500 for the ipad 2. And with its price $199 the Kindle Fire may be the kind of compromise those customers are looking for. The 7 inch screen, although only about half the size of the ipad 2, has terrific picture quality for the price, and it has a great web browser, Silk, which loads web pages even faster than the ipad, by sharing the job with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) system.
In fact, a lot of what makes the Kindle Fire attractive comes not from its hardware, which is of the decent but not exceptional “you get what you pay for” variety, but from the web services the device lets you access. First among these is Amazon’s vast inventory of Audio video and digital media, including its magazine and book services, together with essential media apps for services like Netflix, Pandora and Hulu, which are available through Amazon’s app store. The downside here is that virtually all the services you have access to come through Amazon, and a $79 per year membership in Amazon Prime is necessary to access the best of them, although Kindle Fire Purchasers get their first year free. Amazon isn’t really doing anything here that we haven’t seen before, Apple treats ipad users the same way after all, and competing services like those mentioned above, as well as others like Rhapsody and comiXology, are available through the app store.
There are some negatives to consider. The Kindle fire doesn’t have 3G wireless capability, cameras or microphones, or GPS, and it has only 8GB storage, although you do get an additional 5GB storage in the Amazon cloud. It’s also worth mentioning that Amazon has come under fire for data mining its Kindle Fire users through the Silk browser. Whichever option you choose you’ll have the peace of mind knowing that you have access to the same level of Amazon customer services.
We’ve already established that the Kindle fire isn’t the ipad2. Is the Nook? A comparison with the e-reader turned tablet from Barnes and Noble shows that the Nook has the edge on hardware, although Amazon’s services offered on the Kindle Fire outdo those available on Barnes and Nobel’s device. The Nook will accommodate 16 GB of apps, and only reserves 1GB for personal content, but this is easily expandable to an additional 32 GB with an inexpensive ($15) micro SD card. The Nook also has better battery life and is rechargeable with a micro USB cable, although both tablets come with custom chargers.
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John Storey is an avid reader, and loves to try out new devices that are attempting to overtake books as the main medium of reading. He helps to market 
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