Following up on my post a couple of days back Amazon announced not 1, not 2, not 3! but 4!! new devices today.

The expectation was they would release a 7' Android based tablet and maybe a touch screen upgrade to the aging Kindle 3, I have to say I didn't expect them to refresh the entire Kindle E-Ink line but as they seem to have adopted Apple's press conference style I guess it makes sense to cash in on the annual hardware release cycle as well.

Speaking of press conference style I think Amazon did a great job of using the 'Jobs' style of theatrical announcing. Having said that there was a major piece of the puzzle missing that being the charismatic animal that is Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos is without doubt a genius however his onstage charisma is none existent, at the point he announced the incredible $199 price point for the tablet I didn't hear one person in the audience cheer or clap… if that was an Apple announcement and Jobs had told everyone he was doubling the price of the IPhone people would be whooping and spraying champagne on him! 3 out of 10 for stage presence Jeff :-/

Device wise the old Kindle 3 has been replaced by a slightly smaller device (same 6 inch screen size) minus the keyboard, this isn't a bad move as I can't remember the last time I used the keyboard on my Kindle. The new Kindle Touch and Touch 3G now become the premium E-Ink devices sporting a funky infrared system to manage touch commands(presumably to avoid the secondary layer which can blur the E-ink display) and the same pared down style as the none touch Kindle. The Kindle Fire (I'm undecided on that name tbh) on the other hand is a completely new offering sporting a 7inch IPS full colour display and running on a highly customised version of Android, so customised that you would actually have no clue it was Android unless you were told. Amazon has done a great job with the UI bringing something a little different to the rest of the tablets on the market by displaying what you can only describe as a bookshelf of recent activities, these are categorised by music, movie, apps etc and can be customised to 'sticky' your favoite books and apps etc.

Other neat things Amazon has done is to put all your content in the cloud, this means unlimited storage for your device as they are now using the famous 'WhisperSync' to sync all of your content to the EC2 servers in the cloud, frankly I think it's days of whispering are over given the volume of data a tablet can consume so I'll be looking out for the rebranded 'ShoutingBloodlyLoudlySync' any time soon. Amazon also showed an interesting mechanism they have developed to speed up the web browsing experience, this works by the page being requested from EC2 which then makes the web call and constructs the page remotely, this is then sent back to the tablet in one data larger block rather than lots of smaller requests. It's a good idea (I believe opera mini uses a similar technique) however it remains to be seem what happens to Flash, AJAX etc.

All in all I think releasing the tablet at $199 will be game changing to the tablet market although I personally don't see this as an Ipad killer but maybe more of a 'my first tablet' device before you graduate to the elder statesman from cupertino, Apple might not be quaking in its boots just yet but I imagine the other tablet vendors are feeling pretty sorry for themselves tonight.

Kindle Fire

Kindle Touch

Kindle

Currently only the low end replacement E-Ink tablet is available for pre order in the UK, the ship date for the Fire in the US currently stands at Nov 15th. If this launch is anything like the Kindle 3 release people will be waiting for weeks to get their hands on one.