Amazon's Kindle Fire and the Apple iPad: Dissected!
Since it's announcement last September, Kindle Fire have view as the tablet that will "finally" unseat the dominance of the Apple iPad and these are claim where made on the basis that Kindle Fire is a cheap "android" tablet but offers content that can rival Apple's apps, audio/music, videos and ebook library, while providing a cloud service that equals if not better than the iCloud service of Apple.
Before we make any drastic conclusion let's checkout the Kindle Fire and iPad's ecosystem.
Hardware
Kindle Fire is cheap-dirt compare to the iPad. I'm not going to discuss the hardware in details, since you probably read reviews for Kindle Fire and iPad. But to me the main difference between the two are the camera, display, storage and the processor.
Display
iPad is sporting a 9.7" screen with fingerprint- and scratch-resistant glass, while the Amazon Kindle Fire is a 7" multi-touch display w/ 1024×600 (169 ppi) screen resolution. Steve Jobs once said that 7" screens are "too small to express the software" and tablets with 7" screens are "DOA" or dead-on-arrival", of course that was before Kindle Fire.
Storage
Kindle Fire will have 8 GB of storage which is said to be good for "80 apps, plus either 10 movies (depending on the quality of the movies) or 800 songs or 6,000 books" compare to the iPad, it has three capacity options for storage: 16, 32, or 64 GB of internal flash memory, just do the math on how many apps, movies, songs and books you can store.
Processor
On the processor side Kindle Fire is powered by Texas Instrument's OMAP 4 dual-core processor which is the same processor used in BB Playbook and the recently announced Motorola Droid RAZR. While the iPad 2 uses 1 GHz Apple A5 which is also based on the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU[3] with NEON SIMD accelerator and a dual core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU, the 1 GHz Apple A5 is also used in the new iPhone 4S. Judging from the processor and screen sizes, Ipad is ideal for apps that requires more processing power and screen real-estate, which when run on the Kindle Fire may put the tablet to a crawl.
Camera
iPad has 0.7 MP back camera that can shoot 720p HD video at 30 fps with 5x digital zoom and still camera with 5x digital zoom while the second camera is a 0.3 MP front camera shoots VGA-quality 30 fps video and VGA-quality still photos and mainly used for the Facetime feature or video chatting. The Kindle Fire does not have any camera.
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