Amazon Kindle Fire | featured news

Could the next big move from Amazon.com be a smartphone? analyst Mark Mahaney asserted in a research note this morning that the company could follow up its recent launch of the Kindle Fire tablet with a smartphone that would launch in time for the 2012 holiday season.

Two early studies of the innards of Amazon.com's new Kindle Fire point to what many people suspected already—the company isn't making much, if anything at all, on the $199 device's hardware.

If you're wondering if Amazon's Kindle Fire is up to snuff, well, it is. Turn it on and you know what to do, like with an Apple product. So much like an Apple product that Apple should be scared."

When Kindle Fire customers across the country open their boxes next week, they will be able to choose from several thousand of the most popular Android apps and games, including Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio. Kindle Fire customers will be able to download these apps and games without having to register multiple times and using Amazon’s simple and secure 1-Click payment technology. Plus, all apps are Amazon-tested on Kindle Fire for the best experience possible, customers can get a great “paid” app for free every day, and once you’ve downloaded an app from the Amazon Appstore, it’s available on Kindle Fire as well as your other Android-based devices.

Amazon is likely to change its product roadmap by shifting the display size of its next-generation Kindle Fire to 8.9-inch instead of 10.1-inch as originally planned, according to sources in Amazon's supply chain.

Barnes & Noble is upgrading its Nook e-reader line with a device that's less like an e-reader and more like a full-blown tablet, taking up the fight with Amazon as it is set to launch its Kindle Fire tablet....

Ever since Amazon unveiled its 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet in September, a lingering phrase has been attached to the low-cost, high-profile device: "the iPad's first true Android competitor."

The Kindle Fire tablet may be the hottest selling gadget this holiday, pressuring Amazon.com Inc's profit margins but giving the world's largest Internet retailer potentially millions of new high-spending customers.

Apple could scarcely be more dominant in the nascent tablet computing market, but Amazon could change that in a hurry, a new study suggests.

"Leaked" screen shots, allegedly from Amazon's internal stock monitoring system, suggest the new Kindle Fire tablet is already a hot item, racking up 250,000 reservations in five days.