Amazon just unveiled its new Kindle lineup, including both black-and-white e-reader models and upgraded versions of last year's color Kindle Fire tablet. The base Kindle Fire got a processor upgrade, and got bumped down in price to $159. And the new Kindle Fire HD, which starts at the same $199 price point last year's Kindle Fire did, is basically "more of the same": It has twice the memory, a faster processor and a sharper display, and it adds a camera for making Skype calls with. But it's fundamentally the same Kindle as always ... except for an important difference that we'll get to in a moment.
The 8.7-inch Kindle Fire HD, on the other hand, isn't just "a generic-brand iPad," and that's not just because it lets you shop from Amazon instead of iTunes. Here are three unexpected features they have, which might make you look at them differently.
$49.99 for a whole year of wireless Internet
It's easy to gloss over price tags. "$49.99 wireless Internet"? That sounds about right, especially for a 4G connection. Then you realize it's for a whole year, and you might do a double-take.
That $49.99 price tag includes 250 MB of 4G wireless data a month. Amazon's press release doesn't say which carrier's providing that data, but it does say that you can upgrade to a 3 GB or 5 GB plan from AT&T. None of those plans will last very long if you're streaming 1080p video -- iPad owners found that out earlier this year -- but with AT&T's regular 250 MB plan going for $15 a month, or $180 per year, the Kindle Fire HD offers a significant savings.
Built-in Retina Display
Amazon can't use the term "Retina Display", because it's been trademarked by Apple. But what it means is a screen so sharp you can't tell the pixels apart with your unaided eye, at the distance you'd normally use it from. And as PCMag's Jamie Lendino points out, the Kindle Fire HD's display has almost exactly the same pixel density as the new Retina iPad's, accounting for its smaller screen size.
Ads on your personal tablet
Amazon doesn't seem to like the word "Ads," preferring to call them "special offers and sponsored screensavers" on the Kindle Fire HD's product page. And these aren't web ads, either; in an aside, Amazon explains how your lock screen will always show these "special offers," and they'll be visible in the lower-left corner of your home screen as well -a fact that's been carefully omitted from most of the screenshots.
Amazon's black-and-white Kindle e-readers have shown ads for awhile now. But they give you the option to buy a more expensive model that doesn't have them. That's an option the new Kindle models lack -- every one of them.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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