The Amazon Fire, formerly called the Kindle Fire, is a line of tablet computers developed by Amazon. Built with Quanta Computer, the Kindle Fire was first released in November 2011, featuring a color 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS technology and running on Fire OS, an Android-based operating system. The Kindle Fire HD followed in September 2012, and the Kindle Fire HDX in September 2013. In September 2014, when the fourth generation was introduced, the name "Kindle" was dropped. In later generations, the Fire tablet is also able to convert into a Smart speaker turning on the "Show Mode" options, which the primary interaction will be by voice command through Alexa.
History
The Kindle Fire—which includes access to the Amazon Appstore, streaming movies and TV shows, and the Kindle Store for e-books—was released to consumers in the United States on November 14, 2011, after being announced on September 28.
The original Kindle Fire retailed for in 2011. Estimates of the device's initial bill of materials cost ranged from $150 to $202. Amazon's business strategy was stated in 2011 as making money through sales of digital content on the Fire, rather than through sales of the device itself.
On September 6, 2012, the Kindle Fire was upgraded to the second generation, and its price was reduced to , RAM upgraded to 1 GB and processor clock speed upgraded to 1.2 GHz. On September 7, 2012, upgrades to the device were announced with consumer availability to those European countries with a localised version of Amazon's website (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain).
, the Kindle Fire was the second best selling tablet after Apple's iPad, with about 7 million units sold according to estimates by Forrester Research and Amazon's tablets were the fourth best selling.
The Fire tablet line was not updated until 2015; Amazon only released Fire HD and Fire HDX tablets during that time. In 2015 Amazon made a full refresh of their tablet family where they brought the range down market as a series of budget focused devices, returning to the lower-spec Fire line and cancelling the HDX line.
In September 2015, Amazon announced the release of the Fire 7, priced at for the 8GB version that displays advertisements on the lock screen. it was the lowest-priced Amazon tablet. In June 2016, its price was dropped briefly to . This fifth generation tablet introduced a micro SD card slot for extra storage.
A slightly improved Fire 7 was released in June 2017, keeping the US$49.99 price point.
An upgraded model of Fire 7 was announced in May 2019, with a scheduled release in June 2019 and keeping the US$49.99 price point.
In 2022, Amazon released a significantly updated model of the Fire 7. New features to the basic Fire line are USB-C, Fire OS 8, a 2 MP front camera, a larger 10-hour life capable battery, and a significantly faster SoC with twice the RAM and storage of the previous generation. Though the tablet still features budget hardware Amazon increased the base price to $59.99.
Design
Hardware
The Kindle Fire hardware is manufactured by Quanta Computer (an Original Design Manufacturer), which also originally helped design the BlackBerry PlayBook, using it as a hardware template for the Kindle Fire. First-generation Kindle Fire devices employed a 1-GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 dual-core processor. The device has a 2-point multi-touch colour LCD screen with a diagonal length of and a 600×1024-pixel resolution (160 dpi density). Connectivity is through 802.11n Wi-Fi and USB 2.0 (Micro-B connector). The device includes 8 GB of internal storage—said to be enough for 80 applications, plus either 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books. According to Amazon, the first-generation Kindle Fire's 4400 mAh battery sustains up to 8 hours of consecutive reading and up to 7.5 hours of video playback with wireless off; later generations all offered around 7–8 hours
Of the 8 GB internal storage available in the first-generation Kindle Fire, approximately 6.5 GB was available for content.
The first-generation Kindle Fire has a sensor on the upper left-hand corner of the screen. This was widely considered to be an ambient-light sensor, disabled since an early software upgrade.
Colour display technologies consume much more power than monochrome electronic paper (E-ink) types; Fire offer a typical battery life of 8 hours of mixed usage, while monochrome Kindles offer 15 to 30 hours' use without WiFi—"battery lasts weeks on a single charge"—with a much lower-capacity battery.