The Amazon Kindle Fire vs. The iPad 2

Up until now, if you wanted a tablet you got an iPad and if you wanted a e-reader you got a Kindle. But, Amazon wants to change the rules. On November 15, 2011 they released the Kindle Fire at a price lower than the cost to make it: $199. With this action they moved to take a large bite out of the tablet market. But, what do you give up if you go with the Kindle Fire? What do you gain? And, is it worth it?

The iPad 2 is a beautiful work of engineering. It is one of Apple’s best products ever. With it you can watch HD movies and you can video chat with FaceTime. Then there’s the app store with hundreds of thousands of capability boosting apps and games. The iPad has a gyroscope to notice which way you’re holding it. And, when you need directions it’s got GPS and wireless internet.

The Kindle on the other hand has no cameras or microphones, so no video chat. You can watch movies, but they’re not quite in HD. No gyroscope, no GPS, and only Wi-Fi, no cellular internet plans. But, the Kindle does have the power of Amazon behind it. One more knock on the Fire, despite being smaller, it has a shorter battery life than the iPad.

But the Fire is only $200 and is incredible for that price. Amazon wants to make sure you never go un-entertained. They have the Kindle Store stocked with full color magazines, books, and games.  And just to make sure that you never run out of space, which would be pretty easy with the meager 8 GB of internal storage in the Kindle, they give you unlimited cloud storage for all your content.

The Fire and the iPad both have email clients and document reading capabilities, the iPad can create documents while the Kindle can only read them. They both can stream Netflix and Pandora, but if you have a Amazon Prime account you can also stream 10,000 movies and TV shows, as well as borrow any over around 5,000 books on the Kindle.

So you get a lot with the $200 Kindle Fire. You give up some pretty big features, but overall it is an incredible deal. Especially considering the least expensive iPad is $300 more.