Amazon has today added two new models to their range of Kindle Fire tablets, aiming at the low to mid-range end of the market, launching the Kindle Fire HD6 and HD7.
As the name suggests, the Kindle Fire HD6 and HD7 are tablets with 6″ and 7″ 1280×800 resolution screen, which are covered in Gorilla Glass 3. Amazon has included a decent array of hardware specs on-board the tablets with a 1.5GHz Quad-Core processor powering the tablets, exactly which processor is unknown at this stage, with Amazon advising they have ‘3x the graphics performance of the Samsung Tab 4’ for what that’s worth.
The new FireHD tablets come with a VGA Front-facing camera, as well as a 2MP rear camera. The tablets come with Dolby Audio, although the 6″ version contains only a Mono speaker, but the 7″ version comes with a much better Dual-speaker Stereo arrangement.
Amazon has announced the tablets will be available in five colours: black, white, cobalt, magenta, and citron and with options for 8GB or 16GB of storage (no microSD card expansion) – but before you head off to order these guys, it seems Australians won’t be able to access all these wonderful new options.
The Kindle Fire HD6 and HD7 come with the new version of Amazon’s forked version of Android, they’ve bumped the version up to 4.0 and named it FireOS Sangria. Amazon has built Sangria on KitKat, but haven’t advised which point release, although they do point to a number of new features included in their latest incarnation, as well as an improved UI.
Smart Suspend is a feature which will have to be tested to see how useful it is. Smart Suspend will allow Sangria to develop a ‘device-specific profile’ which predicts when you use wireless connections on your tablet, essentially it will turn your Wi-Fi on and off when it thinks you need it to check for notifications.
Sangria also introduces something we’ve had on stock Android for a while – Profiles. You can now set up individual profiles for each family member so they can have their own settings, and accounts setup.
Firefly – an object recognition system that Amazon launched recently on the FirePhone. Firefly uses both audio as well as visual cues to help it recognise things, allowing you to purchase them quickly from Amazon if you want.
Amazon also introduced Family Library, a new service coming soon that lets you link your Amazon account to your partner or other members of your household so you can share your Amazon content like apps and books without changing accounts. This is something Google could take note of here.
At least one of the features isn’t terribly useful to us here in Australia. Advanced Streaming and Prediction (ASAP) which is Amazons prediction service for their movie and TV streaming service which predicts what episode or movie you want next and starts it automatically.
The tablets are available for pre-order now, with stock expected to ship on the 2nd of October. The Amazon website does have some limitations though, offering only the 8GB FireHD6 and 8GB FireHD7 to pre-order – with an asking price of AUD$114 for the HD6 and AUD$154 for the HD7. There’s also no options for colours to choose from, so we hope you like Black.
