Kindle Fire 2 (Refresh / Update) – Release Date, Price and Features – The Essentials

Amazon has recently announced its new family of tablets and e-readers, and while doing it the retailer has shown that it wants to make an impact in the gadget industry and that it’s prepared to fully commit into making devices suited for everyone’s needs and wallets.

Last year’s Kindle Fire was already a good device, and the revamped version (Kindle Fire 2 / Refresh / Update, however you want to call it) has been recently announced by Amazon at its announcement. But this time it came along with two other Kindle Fire HD slates (Kindle Fire HD 7 and Kindle Fire HD 8.9), so that kind of leaves the device in discussion with a more budget-friendly appeal. Join us after the break for more details.

Kindle Fire 2: Specs and Features

Even if doesn’t have the HD tag, the new Kindle Fire isn’t obsolete. It sports 1 GB of RAM, double than its predecessor, a new dual-core 1.2 GHz OMAP 4430 CPU which Amazon touts is 44% faster than last year’s model and a bigger battery that should last you 8.5 hours of continuous usage.

The slate also has all of Amazon’s latest software innovations, like Amazon’s Cloud service, X-Ray for movies and books to provide you with useful info about a certain actor or chapter from a book, Whispersync which basically syncs all of your media with any other device running the Kindle app and the Kindle FreeTime is a useful parental control app that lets you choose what content and for how long your kid can use the device.

Kindle Fire 2 Release Date and Price

The new Kindle Fire is new Kindle Fire is available for pre-order right now and will start arriving to customers on the 14th of September. Pricing has been set at $159, putting it in competition with Google’s Nexus 7 ( which cost $40 more ). Overall, I think the Kindle Fire offers good value for the money, but the absence of a SD slot or any other way to expand its limited 8 GB internal storage is a big disappointment.

Would you consider buying the Amazon Kindle Fire, or do you consider it’s still not as good as other affordable slates?

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