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So in searching for a little more information on the new Kindle that Amazon have launched in the UK I stumbled across the fact that in the US they have launched two new additional model, a touchscreen version and the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is a colour touchscreen dual-core tablet with a 7″ screen and 8GB of storage, all for $199. One of the key features of the Kindle Fire is the Amazon Silk web browser that will dramatically improve the web browsing experience for the user by utilizing the Amazon Web Services cloud to act as a form of proxy server and carry out much of the computational load of displaying a webpage which might contain elements from many different servers thus requiring many requests to many different IPs. In addition through analysis of web requests flowing through the Amazon Web Services cloud they can predict the most likely next page a user might browse to and preload that page in the background as the user views the original page again decreasing the time waiting for a page to load.

Have Amazon created the first viable non-iPad tablet by not copying the iPad?

What most tablet manufacturers have failed to realise is that the iPad is a success not solely because of its form but because of its ecosystem also. Android tablets generally are too variable to be considered a coherent set of hardware sharing the same ecosystem.

But I believe that Amazon will succeed with the Fire because they are not going after the niche currently occupied by Apple instead they have created a device whose purpose is to help sell more products through Amazon. Despite productivity tools such as word processors, spreadsheet apps and photo editing apps being available on iPad tablets are essentially devices for consuming content not they are pretty lousy for producing content. Amazon have realised this and produced the optimal content consumption device and ecosystem.