Kindle Fire Specs

The technical specs for the Kindle Fire are a little underwhelming when compared to other tablets like the iPad, Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom but you have to put it in to the context in which the device is used for.

The Kindle Fire is a casual media consumption device for lounging around watching videos, playing a few simple games or idly surfing the Internet, it’s not designed to create documents, graphics, presentations, edit images and the like so it doesn’t need to be an all singing, all dancing device.

We’ll start with the geeky specs first. Amazon is remarkably cagey about the technical specifications beyond the basics but numerous tear downs where people have literally taken the device apart to discover every chip and component has shed some light on to the hardware specs.

The processor is a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 dual core processor clocked at 1 Ghz. It can be clocked higher but it was probably a trade off to get good battery life. This processor is comparable with Apple’s iPad 2 dual core processor from ARM. Amazon offers absolutely zero information about the amount of RAM in the device but again with the tear downs we now know that it comes with 512 MB RAM. This might sound small given that most PC’s now come with 4GB RAM but it is still comparable with the iPad 2.

You get 6 GB of space to store your content on which might not sound like much but it’s enough for around 80 apps and 800 songs. Or if you want to use it primarily for movies you should be able to squeeze 8-10 movies on there. The point of the Kindle Fire though is not as a storage device but a way to access content from the Internet so you should be making use of Amazon’s cloud service to upload all your media and then access it from anywhere you have a wifi connection.

Amazon claims the battery can give up to 7.5 hours of video playback with the wifi connection turned off but many owners have reported lower numbers around 5-6 hours. When you turn wifi on you can expect that to reduce to 4-5 hours of usage time. You’ll certainly be charging it up every other day if you plan to use it on a daily basis.

The 7” screen uses multi-touch technology so you can use all the hand gestures that you probably know from using an iPad or one of the latest smartphones. The resolution is pretty good for a 7” screen too at 1024x600 and it packs in 169 pixels per inch compared to the iPad’s 132 PPI. This means that text is clearer on a small screen and clarity in the movies is retained.

The Kindle Fire is built to be a device that accesses content from the Internet so it’s surprising that they didn’t include a 3G chip inside to connect to the Internet from anywhere, but probably to reduce costs they decided to go for a wifi only connection. As you would expect, it connects to all past and present wifi specifications and handles all the standard security protocols like WEP and WPA2.

As mentioned at the start of the report you will notice some hardware missing that is available even on smartphones. There is no camera, no 3G chip, no GPS and no microphone which means that the Kindle Fire is a purely media consumption device.