Amazon Kindle Fire: price, release date, video hands-on, and more

Amazon's new 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire tablet technically runs on Android, but it's not the user experience you might expect -- rather than the typical array of user-configurable homescreens, the main interface is a handsome rotating bookshelf where you store your virtual books, magazines, CDs and apps all together. By default, your most recently accessed

Amazon's new 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire tablet technically runs on Android, but it's not the user experience you might expect -- rather than the typical array of user-configurable homescreens, the main interface is a handsome rotating bookshelf where you store your virtual books, magazines, CDs and apps all together. By default, your most recently accessed items will appear on top, though you can also pin items to a "favorites shelf." There are also an array of distinct tabs labeled Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps and Web, each of which play to Amazon's content strengths.

You might be aware that the company launched its own Appstore on Android earlier this year, streams Amazon Instant Video and will already store some of your music and files in the cloud, but the company's got brand-new content deals on tap -- like 100 "exclusive" graphic novels, including Watchmen, and hundreds of magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and a selection from Conde Nast. Amazon's also leveraging its EC2 cloud computing platform for even more this time around: the Kindle Fire will only have 8GB of local storage, but every bit of that allotment will be backed up in the cloud, and the Kindle Fire's Silk web browser will actually run remotely on Amazon's servers, too.

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