Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the new, color Kindle Fire.

If you want some exciting news, then I have some exciting news for you.  Amazon’s best-selling Kindle, which basically created a market for ebooks, is going to be branching out officially.  Amazon is preparing to launch a $199 iPad killer dubbed the Amazon Kindle Fire; meanwhile, they’re also improving the original Kindle by making it a touchscreen device for easier usage and dropping the price for everything.  The original Kindle now sells for $79; the Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G (with free 3G wireless) are $99 and $149; the Kindle Fire is $199.

“What we are doing is offering premium products at non-premium prices,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.  He said other tablet makers “have not been competitive on price” and added that they “have just sold a piece of hardware.  We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet.  We think of it as a service.”

Every Kindle Fire will include a 7-inch screen and a custom-designed Google Android interface smoothed over with Amazon’s style and ease of use.  Every Kindle Fire will also come with a sample of Amazon Prime, which means that for 30 days after the Kindle Fire, users will get access to Amazon’s streaming videos and free shipping on all products (which is a pretty sweet deal).  Unlike the iPad 2, the Kindle Fire lacks the webcams and microphone built in and has no 3G cellular connection, but odds are the people you know with an iPad 2 don’t use/have 3G, either.  The Kindle Fire is lighter than the iPad 2, despite being slightly thicker.  While the Kindle only has 8 GB of internal storage, it gets free storage via Amazon Cloud and the customized Amazon Silk web browser.

The important thing for the Amazon Kindle Fire is its price point, of course.  Do the missing features hurt the Kindle Fire a bit?  Possibly.  Does the fact you can buy two Kindle Fires for the price of a single iPad make up for that?  You bet.

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