Back in September of last year, Amazon bucked the trend on eReaders and launched the full-color touchscreen Kindle Fire tablet. Unlike the previous Kindles, which had highly readable e-ink, the Fire was deigned to give users a more functionality — all backed by Amazon’s growing media infrastructure. Now, it seems that the popular Fire might have some new friends coming this year.
The China Economic News Service, billing itself as “the best online supplier database in greater China,” posts a claim in their Taiwan Economic News section that Amazon will soon be adding three new Fire-like tablets to its line of Kindles. From CENS:
Amazon will roll out three new models of tablet PCs, bringing ample business opportunities to Taiwanese supporting factories, including Quanta and Hon Hai for assembly orders, Prime View and Chimei Innolux for FPD (flat panel display) supply, and Chimei Innolux for exclusive supply of 7” touch sensors.
According to the best online supplier database in greater China, the new tablets will be coming in two sizes but three different resolutions. The first, a 7″ 1024×600 pixel tablet mimics the current Kindle specifications. However, a new higher-end 7″ device with a 1280×890 screen will be coming as well. Dwarfing both of those will be an 8.9″ tablet with a whopping 1920×1200 pixel screen.
This is, of course, still small potatoes compared to the new iPad’s 2048×1536 retina display.
Though they’ve only been in the wild for a few months, the Kindle Fires have proven to be remarkably popular — moving about a million per week in the month of December, 2011. What remains to be seen is what other new features we might expect to find in these new devices, as CENS mostly concerns itself with the physical characteristics of the devices. There’s also the question of what will become of the rest of the Kindle line, which is currently entirely e-ink based and focused on book reading.
One thing is certain: Amazon seems more confident than ever that it can compete toe-to-toe with the iPad. We’ll just have to wait and see what these new Kindles actually look like, or if they even materialize.
- Amazon introduces the Kindle Fire at $199
- Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet is still looking pretty good
- Amazon has sold two million “singles” eBooks
- Books are still pretty rad
