At a live event today, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced new products at at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California.
Bezos unveiled the Kindle Paperwhite, a smaller, thinner Kindle Touch which will retail for $119, with 3G, it’s $179. Pre-orders begin today and the product ships on October 1.
The current Kindle Touch will remain on the market with a $10 price decrease from $79 to $69. It ships September 14th.
The Kindle Fire, with double the current RAM and claimed to be 40% faster with longer battery life gets a $40 price cut from $199 to $159. It also ships on September 14th.
Bezos then announced the “Kindle Fire HD” in two sizes:
• 8.9-inch (1920 x 1200, IPS, 254 ppi) display (iPad’s Retina Display is 9.7-inch IPS @ 2048 x 1536, 264 ppi) with dual stereo speakers (the first tablet with Dolby Digital Plus) and dual-band 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi with dual antennas. 8.8mm thick. (iPad with Retina display is 9.4 mm thick.) HD front-facing camera. with “Kindle FreeTime,” multi-user support (think kids) with time limits that can be set for various functions (TV, apps, etc.) HDMI out. Bluetooth.
– 16GB Wi-Fi-only – $299
– 32 GB with 4G LTE – $499 (Users get 250MB per month data, 20GB of Amazon cloud storage, and a $10 app store credit for US$49.99 per year)
• 7-inch, dual stereo speakers (the first tablet with Dolby Digital Plus) and dual-band 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi with dual antennas. HD front-facing camera. Multi-user support with time limits that can be set for various functions (TV, apps, etc.) HDMI out. Bluetooth.
– 16 GB – $199
8.9-in Kindle Fire HD ships on November 20th. 7-inch Kindle Fire HD ships September 14th.
MacDailyNews Take: Mr. Cook, the ball’s in your court.
Kindle paperweight?
Hey, don’t knock it. There are rabid fans of Kindles… and most of them are readers. And I’m not talking about reading comments on MDN. These look like they’re great devices.
Yes, I know a few. They like their Kindle for reading e-books. I have had all three iPads and while they are good for reading I’ll have to admit the Kindle is better. But that’s as far as it goes. Of course that’s all they are really supposed to be is a reader.
With all these new Kindles and I am sure other tablets coming out, wouldn’t it be funny if Apple DID NOT come out with a smaller tablet and Amazon went broke because of selling all this stuff below cost??
Yea, we lose money on every sale….. But we make it up on volume… LOL
Just a thought
You laugh, but look at Amazon’s share price with a P/E of 307, so it must have a lot of suckers fooled. Apparently Amazon makes Wall Street happy despite all the money it is losing. Apple is making plenty of money, but Wall Street appears rather unsatisfied about Apple’s steady cashflow. There’s something fishy about how Wall Street and investors value companies.
Amazon appears ready to bring the tablet fight directly to Apple despite how foolish or futile it seems. The media loves Amazon’s cockiness. Seriously, Apple really needs to deliver a knockout blow to Amazon’s game sooner than later.
Great thought! If you think Jeff Bezos has a goofy look on his face most of the time can you imagine what it would look like if there is no iPad mini? Ta daaaaaaaaaaaah!
The what???? Paperweight?
Should that read a “spew” of new devices?
or “Amazon slew new Kindle tablets”?
OMG — nail polish?!!!
Amazon announces, in conjunction with the DOJ their newest scheme to sell everything at a loss to monopolize the publishing industry.
“We feel our money losing, monopolistic strategy is sound, having been endorsed by the DOJ and Wall Street who has us valued at a ridiculous PE ratio. Can you believe those dipshits?, I mean come on…”
… answers to … someone’s? … prayers. And I’m sure they are better than the previous models. And I’m POSITIVE we will get reports of improved sales!
None of which says they will gain significant market share against the iPad. Or that any iPad owners will be sold on them.
A Dolby Digital tablet…
The Paperwhite looks awesome. I’ll settle for one of those if Apple doesn’t announce the iPad mini this year.
Waiting to see how much the larger Fire is. Amazon undercut Google’s Nexus on the new “regular” Fire – $159.
Starting at $299 for the 16gb version.
So, $299 for the 8.9 inch “HD” Kindle Fire. Ok. Good luck trying to convince people to get this crippled device over an iPad 2 or current gen iPad.
Ok, the $499 for a 4G one with 32GB is not a bad deal at all for people looking for a basic tablet.
with lock screen ads…
The current gen Kindle Fire does not have ads on the lock screen…
The only Kindles with ads on the lock screen are the e-reader Kindles that have the “Special Offers” (which is $20 less than the versions without them).
Full screen saver ads. And no option to ‘opt-out’ on and of the new models.
Oh wow. That *DOES* suck.
The way Bezos rips off Steve Jobs is really getting under my skin. Makes me want to scalp his bald head right off.
Looks like an intriguing new product mix. And, they are not in the line of fire over the iPad. Kindles are great for consumption, especially reading ebooks. For that task, they are way better than an iPad. They’ve positioned themselves as content consumption devices. Nice move.
I must admit I am impressed. The 4G model with service for just $50/year is crazy. And the rumors are that the iPad mini won’t be a retina display, while Amazon’s is, so that’s a big improvement. I also like Amazon’s content integration – all the whispersync stuff – and the multiuser/time limit stuff for kids is huge. I sure hope Apple is ready for some real competition, at least on the consumption-device side. Should be interesting!
Apple is sleeping at the switch.
It takes them a year to make another iPhone 1 mm thinner and 6.8675 mm longer… Wupppiieee
Apple is just trying to catch up with the rest of the industry, 4g, screen size, iOS is hopelessly stagnated in lala land, where all the little apps are happily living ever after in a locked down prison and can’t do shit.
Really? I could have sworn that Apple released a 4G tablet before Amazon did…
The Fire HD does not have a Retina Display. It has fewer ppi than the new iPad.
Also, it’s $50 a year for 250 MB per month of 4G data. That’s less than one HD movie per month. Once you go over, how much you wanna bet you’re gonna pay a major premium?
> 32 GB with 4G LTE – $499 (Users get 250MB per month data,
>
250MB is better than nothing and could last a couple days with careful usage. No good for content consumption, I must be missing something.
Two Words. Battery Life.
Oh no! Its an ipad killer!
I think it would be foolish to lightly dismiss these models, particularly the HD model.
People who are accustomed to iPads will certainly be aware of the differences, but many casual users will reckon that a Kindle will suit their purposes very well.
There has been some original thinking, which is to be applauded, but while it’s not up there with the iPad, it has to be regarded as the best of the rest. It will certainly kill off the weaker performers in the Android tablet market and the resulting fire sales might cause some collateral damage to other models that might have otherwise been marginally viable.
Respect to Amazon for demonstrating a finished product that will ship very soon. Compare and contrast with Nokia’s Microsoftian launch of an unfinished phone with faked demonstration images, no price announcement and no availability announcement.
2 words – product confusion
The new Kindles are up in the iPads price range now. Guess Amazon figured out you can’t build a good tablet and sell it for next to nothing. $499 that’s allot for a Kindle. When the Kindle fire was launched it was hailed for its low price. You could buy 2,5 Kindles for one iPad. Well guess what, they were not very good tablets.
Apple lead the way with high resolution screens. Interesting to see Amazon take note.
It will be interesting to see when iSupply tears these apart how much the cost to build.
And the Paperweight jokes will stick with them for ever. What a stupid name.
“250MB per month data”
I used that amount of data today so how much is the extra 29*250MB what you need to cover the whole month?
You’re not the target demographic. My wife has a $10 data plan. 100MB of data on her iPhone. Rarely does she go over it. She only uses it for email and occasional surfing. Wifi is used elsewhere. Usually google maps is the biggest data suck… iOS 6 Maps will reduce that, being vector-based.
MOST people can survive with 500MB of data and 250MB if they don’t watch video.
They are selling these at cost to make money from the sales of content.
Excellent way to undercut the competition. These devices look to give Apple a run for the money. This is going to be great 🙂 Competition forces innovation.
At $159, the Fire will be very popular with Android fans. I hope they root them and use them to run pirated apps so Amazon never recovers the cost of the device. I always found the loss leader model to be flawed.
It’s halfway decent because Amazon has to compete with Apple.
Drinks all around! 😀
I see a price drop for iPad3