Amazon Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 - Who Wins the Tablet Race?

The Amazon Kindle Fire, as confirmed by multiple reports including company sources, has done amazingly well for itself. There have been third-party reports suggesting the growing sales of the Kindle Fire have taken away, potentially, revenue from sales of anywhere between one and 2 million units of the iPad, in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The news, however, has yet to be confirmed by official sources.

In any case, the fact remains that Amazon's Kindle range of tablets (and in particular the Kindle Fire) is one of the best-selling tablets in the market, despite its not having as many high-end features.

Check out Amazon's Kindle Fire and Apple's iPad 2, as they go head-to-head...

Size: The iPad 2 has a dimension of 241.2×185.7×8.8 mm and weighs 1.33 pounds, while the Wi-Fi and 3G version of the iPad 2 weighs 1.35 pounds. The Amazon Kindle Fire has dimensions of 90×120×11 mm and weighs 0.91 pounds.

Display: Amazon's tablet has 1024 x 600 screen resolution capabilities at 169 ppi, while the iPad 2 has an LCD screen and has resolution capabilities of 1024 x 768 at 132 ppi.

Processor and Memory: The Kindle Fire comes with 8GB of storage space which certainly seems insignificant, compared to even the smallest of the iPads, which come with 16, 32 and 64GB of storage space. The point, however, is that while designing their product, the Amazon designers focused on the practical uses of secondary storage spaces... meaning the Kindle Fire offers cloud storage options, although only for content purchased on Amazon.com

The iPad 2 has a 1GHZ Apple A5 custom dual-core processor and 512MB of memory. The Kindle Fire, on the other hand, has a 1GHZ dual-core TI OMAP 4 processor and also offers 512MB of memory.

Operating System: The iPad 2 uses the iOS 5 software while the Fire runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

Battery: The iPad offers about ten hours of battery life while the Kindle lasts for about eight hours.

Camera: The iPad 2 features dual cameras. The rear camera has a 0.7 megapixel with 5x digital zoom unit that can be used to record video and capture up to 30 high-definition frames per second, with audio. The front camera is only a VGA unit, though. Nevertheless, this is still much better than the Fire, which has no cameras, either in the front or at the back.

Pricing: The Kindle Fire comes at the amazingly low price of $199, while the iPad 2 ranges between $499 and $899.

Apps and GPS: The Kindle Fire has a little more than 15,000 applications to choose from, while the iPad 2 has more than 90,000 applications. Meanwhile, the Fire does not have the GPS option, unlike the 3G models of the iPad.

Music: Unlike Apple's iTunes store, the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Amazon Web site allow users to download Digital Rights Management-free (DRM) music; in essence, allowing you to transfer them to any device you like.

At the end of the day, given its reasonable pricing and neat looks, the Kindle Fire provides understandably intense competition to the iPad 2. However, it must also be said that truly take on the iPad and other competitors, Amazon will need to look at improving some of the features it offers and include some others it doesn't.