Gadgetory

well hey this is Josh Topolsky with The Verge and I'm looking at the Kindle Fire it's Amazon's first full-color tablet which goes on sale for $200 which is a pretty low price the hardware itself should be somewhat familiar if you've ever seen the BlackBerry PlayBook apparently had used the playbooks reference design and the two devices do look nearly identical they have the same size display it's a 7-inch 1024 by 600 LCD display the device is equipped with eight gigs of storage Wi-Fi and 512 megabytes of RAM here you see the home screen of the device this is pretty much where you navigate to all of your content in this scrolling list you see your most recent content and that goes backwards in time you can't actually remove anything from that list so keep it clean the fire is running a customized version of Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread it's actually a forked version so there's no Google stuff on this meaning no Gmail no Android Market Amazon does provide their own app store called the app store which has about 10,000 titles in it compared to Google's 360 thousand titles it doesn't seem like that many but there are some fairly good software selections if you dig deep enough additionally and I think probably the biggest feature of this is that it ties into all of Amazon's music video and book ecosystem so you get access to prime videos and Amazon music and of course the big bookstore and their newsstand which is a magazine and newspaper store and that's directly tied in at the OS level so when you're in your library you can quickly jump to the store and start looking around for new content it's a pretty painless process to get it onto the device another big feature that Amazon is touting is the silk web browser it's a webkit-based browser that is apparently doing some server-side offloading to speed up webpage loading in my testing I didn't really notice any significant boost in speed and in fact I think the browser is kind of clunky in comparison to the iPad 2 or the honeycomb browser in all the fire is a really great tablet for $200 but it is not an iPad killer it's I'm not even sure if the honeycomb killer I mean it's a great little package it will make an awesome holiday gift for a lot of people but it doesn't have the app support right now to warrant recommending this over something like an iPad and frankly I'd be hesitant to recommend it over a honeycomb tablet given the fact that Amazon is asking developers to split their loyalties and work on an app for their ecosystem as well as the standard Android ecosystem but the price is great the content that you have access to is great and I can definitely recommend it for somebody who just wants to lean back not mess with apps too much and just enjoy books and movies