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After more than a year of missteps by Apple's tablet rivals, at least one viable competitor, Amazon's Kindle Fire, appears to have surfaced for the popular iPad. Amazon.com Inc. on Monday trumpeted the success of its recently launched Kindle Fire tablet, part of a family of Kindle products that include low-priced e-readers. The company said it sold more than four times as many Kindle products on Black Friday last week as the same shopping day in 2010.

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.

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.

"You know, Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook," Zuckerberg says. "But you know, when I look at Amazon and Apple and I see companies who are extremely aligned with us, right? And we have a lot of conversations with people at both companies just trying to figure out ways that we can do more together, and there is just a lot of reception there."

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.

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."

Amazon announced Thursday that it has launched a Kindle lending library for owners of its e-reader who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime service. Prime members can borrow one book a month, with no due dates. Users are allowed to have one book out at a time, the company said in a press release. All notes, bookmarks and highlights made on the borrowed book will still be there if the customer later purchases or re-borrows the book.

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.

Amazon expanded a licensing agreement that allows Prime members to stream additional PBS programming.

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