Amazon Ships Kindle Fire A Day Earlier

Kindle Fire, a tablet computer manufactured by online retail giant Amazon.com, and released on Sept. 28, was scheduled to ship on Nov. 15. However, it is now shipping on Nov. 14, a day earlier.

The product, which sells at $199, is the bestselling item on Amazon.com and features a vibrant color touch screen, a powerful dual-core processor and a new browser - Amazon Silk - as well as the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Amazon also offers a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime that allows access to streaming of Amazon's multimedia library of movies and TV shows. Amazon is investing heavily in Prime by bringing new content from CBS, NBC Universal and Twentieth Century Fox.

We're thrilled to be able to ship Kindle Fire to our customers earlier than we expected. Kindle Fire quickly became the bestselling item across all of Amazon.com, and based on customer response we're building millions more than we'd planned, said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle.

Kindle Fire offers customers a fully-integrated service with instant access to over 18 million movies, TV shows, magazines, newspapers, books, songs, apps and games, as well as over 100,000 movies and TV shows from Amazon Instant Video and over 17,000,000 songs from Amazon MP3, in addition to millions of books.

A recent survey shows that there is a strong demand for Kindle Fire, one even surpassing the pre-launch demand for the iPad, when it was first released in 2010.

Proprietary ChangeWave survey data shows that 5 percent of the 2,600 respondents have already pre-ordered or are very likely to buy the Kindle Fire, exceeding pre-launch iPad buying intentions. In February 2010, the same survey showed that 4 percent of 3,200 respondents were very likely to buy Apple's iPad.

Survey data says 26 percent of likely Kindle Fire buyers (i.e. of the 5 percent) say they will delay/put on hold a decision to buy the iPad. Sustained Kindle Fire uptake and buzz will depend on consumer/reviewer reactions to Kindle Fire's user experience.

Amazon's cheaper tablet is expected to do all the basic functions that one normally does on a tablet such as email, surfing the Web and watching videos. So, if the tablet manages to do well on these fronts, then it could be an excellent alternative for price-conscious consumers.

In addition, the tablet could definitely appeal to an entertainment hungry audience, as Amazon would integrate the tablet tightly with its Cloud services that could sell books, movies and music, providing stiff competition to Apple in terms of content.

Following are the specifications of Kindle Fire:

OS: Customized Android

Weight: 0.91 Pounds

Display: 7 Multi-touch 1024x600 display with 169 ppi

Dimensions: 190 x 120 x 11.4 mm

Processor: 1GHz TI OMAP 4 dual-core processor

Storage: 8GB

Expandable Storage: No

Camera: No

3G: No

Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n

Browser: Amazon Silk

Apps Available: About 16,000

Battery: Up to 8.0 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off.