Amazon Kindle Fire HD (Dual-core Processor 1.5GHz; 8.9-inch display) - CNET

As a tablet, the original Kindle Fire was a mediocre specimen that scored lowly on features. As a product, its attractive US$199 price tag, reportedly sold below cost, made it impulse buy material. Amazon sold millions of Kindle Fires, but a year from its original launch, the tablet needed an upgrade to fend off newer competitors such as Google's Nexus 7.

Last week, Amazon launched three new models, including a slightly larger 8.9-inch variant that seems the most interesting of the trio. Here's what you should know of this new version. Do note that while you can buy the Kindle Fire HD in Asia, you may not be able to access all of Amazon's content out of the box.

Upside

With its 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution, the IPS panel on the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD has a pixel density of around 254 PPI. This is practically as sharp as the Retina display on the latest iPad (264 PPI). 

The Kindle Fire HD weighs 567g and measures just 8.8mm thick. Obviously, it can't compete with the 7-inch models, but it's lighter than typical 10.1-inch tablets. The iPad is almost 100 grams more at 662g, though you'll get slightly more screen real-estate on larger slates.

Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, claims that the dual-core 1.5GHz processor on the Kindle Fire HD is more powerful than the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 chip found on many Android tablets. While the Nvidia processor does have two more cores than the Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 on the Kindle Fire, the latter comes with a 3D graphics chipset (albeit a slightly older version) similar to that on the iPad. We won't know for sure till the benchmarks are available, but given the graphics performance gap between the iPad and Tegra 3, it's possible that the Kindle Fire HD may have a slight edge in games.

According to Amazon, the Kindle Fire HD is the first tablet to have dual-antennas and dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) Wi-Fi support. It claims that this will result in up to 40 percent faster downloads and streaming compared with the latest iPad. The boost in Wi-Fi speeds is dependent on your router or modem supporting it e.g. dual-band routers. 

Amazon is also taking baby steps to make the Kindle Fire HD more enterprise friendly. The new tablet now comes with full support for Exchange-based accounts for its email and calendar clients.

With the new Kindles, Amazon is offering FreeTime, a new service starting next month that adds parental controls to its devices. Parents can bar their children from accessing certain content--books, apps, music and videos--on the Kindle Fire HD. They can even restrict the amount of time kids can spend on the devices for certain categories such as videos and games, while not having any limits on books.

Amazon set the bar for tablet pricing with the Kindle Fire and the price for the 8.9-inch Fire HD is just as impressive. The base configuration, the Wi-Fi-only version with 16GB of internal storage, costs US$299. This is US$100 less than the iPad 2, which doesn't come with the Retina display. Meanwhile, the 32GB Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is priced at US$369.

The company also has an 4G/LTE version with 32GB storage that costs the same as the cheapest Retina display iPad at US$499. The 4G iPad equivalent is priced at US$729. Do note that the 4G is unlikely to work outside North America.

Downside

Similar to the original Fire, the latest version runs a modified version of Google's Android operating system. While the company has confirmed that it's based on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), the custom version used by Amazon means that the default Google Apps, such as Maps, aren't included. The interface has been heavily tweaked, too.

You also won't have access to the official Google Play store. Although Amazon's own app store has a decent number of apps, it tends to favor the more popular and mainstream ones. You may not find apps from lesser-known developers.

Finally, the biggest problem with the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is that unlike the 7-inch version (available September 14), it isn't shipping till November 20. That's quite a long wait. You can preorder it now, but we won't be surprised if Apple's rumored iPad mini ends up launching before the Kindle Fire.

Outlook

Amazon will be launching its new Kindle tablets in Europe for the first time. However, the company hasn't disclosed any plans to sell them in Asia--it's likely that interested consumers in this region will have to continue importing them like they did with the existing Kindle Fire. 

Do note that Amazon's tablets are closely integrated with its content ecosystem--the company makes money from selling digital books, music and videos--so if you're residing in a place where Amazon's app store is unavailable, you may want to consider alternatives.