New Kindle Can't Touch iPad

It'll be a competitor, but Apple has little to fear

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Sep 28, 2011 1:30 PM CDT

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Amazon's Kindle Fire Won't Kill Apple's iPad — The Kindle Fire is shown at a news conference, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011 in New York. The e-reader and tablet has a 7-inch (17.78 cm) multicolor touchscreen and will go on sale for $199 on Nov. 15. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Amazon’s new Kindle Fire has been getting a lot of hype as an “iPad killer,” but Apple shouldn’t exactly be quaking in its boots, opines John Paul Titlow of ReadWriteWeb. “As far as hardware is concerned, the Kindle Fire looks more like a cross between the Nook and the BlackBerry Playbook than an iPad copycat.” It’s got no camera, no 3G, no microphone, no accelerometer, and it’s smaller to boot.

“If the Kindle Fire was built for anything, it was built for consuming content,” Titlow explains. Yeah, it’ll have an Appstore—a smaller, curated version of the Android store—but it’s mostly for books, TV, and movies, not an all-purpose device like the iPad. Plus, Amazon doesn’t boast the range of complementing devices Apple does. Still, the Kindle will offer some competition. At $199, it certainly wins on price, and hey, at least it supports Flash. (More Amazon stories.)

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