Amazon caused quite a sensation in the summer of 2011 when they revealed the upcoming release of a new 7 inch tablet with an 8 hour battery life that would run on a particularly customised version of Android and cost less than $200. When the final specs were disclosed the interest reached fever pitch as it was very similar to the iPad 2 with a 1 GHz dual-core processor and 512 MB RAM. Nonetheless tighter investigation and usage of the Kindle Fire shows that far from being an iPad 2 killer, the Kindle Fire meets a completely different role.

The very first thing you may notice when reading through the Kindle Fire specs is the lack of a lot of the hardware which is common-place even on smartphones today. You won’t find a camera, mike, GPS, compass or a 3G chip so what you can do with the Kindle Fire is a little restricted. Amazon has even cut off access to the Android Market-place so you can only download authorized apps from the Kindle Store but before you balk at the idea, the Kindle Store has 16,000 applications available to download including all the most well-liked tools, utilities, office programs and games that you’ll find on the Android Marketplace.

What Amazon has done is make a desirable hand held tablet that leverages its massive media library to become the ultimate consumption device. The Kindle Fire isn’t built to be a creative tablet like the Samsung Galaxy or the Apple iPad 2, it’s built to do one thing which is to make it as simple as possible to access Amazon’s database of films, television shows, ebooks, applications and music. To that end, Amazon even sells the Fire at a total loss because it knows it’ll make up the price in the long run which goes some way towards explaining the awesome price.

So the Kindle Fire is a media consumption device then, what does that suggest? For a start, with Amazon Prime (you get a totally free month subscription when you purchase the Kindle Fire - read more) you get unlimited, unrestricted access to over 100,000 movies and television shows. You can view them whenever you desire, as many times as you would like. By utilizing your WiFi connection the Fire will stream the content to your Kindle device.

You’ll also recieve access to Amazon’s Cloud Storage. What this means is you can upload all the media content that you already own like MP3’s, films and ebooks and then access it from anywhere using your Kindle Fire (presuming there is a Wi Fi connection). You don’t have to drag around an external drive any longer because everything is stored and is accessible from the Net.

Although the Kindle Fire is designed as a consumption device that doesn’t mean you can not utilize it for some productivity purposes, for example you can very easily use it to manage your emails, you can view reports, spreadsheets and presentations using one of the many office programmes that are accessible and you can use it to update your online calendar.

The Android interface has been completely overhauled by Amazon and it is pretty slick, although compared against the refinement of the iPad 2 user interface the Kindle Fire isn’t quite there yet. It’s quite zippy to navigate around, but again, if you are used to the iPad 2 you will notice a lot of difference.

At just $200 for such a dynamic device that gives you access to so much content the Kindle Fire is going to be one of the must have pieces of equipment for 2012.

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