Amazon Kindle Fire unveiling and hands-on photos

September 28, 2011 By Jeffrey Van Camp

A live photogallery of Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet unveiling, from the Jeff Bezos live demonstration to close ups of the actual tablet.

We managed to attend Amazon’s press conference live today in New York. At the event, CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the company’s new 7-inch Android tablet, the Kindle Fire. We weren’t allowed to hold the tablet ourselves, but we were able to snap some photos up close and get live demonstrations of the unit. We’ll have full impressions and some video up in the coming hours, but for now check out a few close up photos of working units and we’ve included a good portion of the presentation that Bezos made to unveil the tablet. He went over every major Amazon service and pointed out how they were all going to be integrated into the Kindle Fire. Check it out! If you have any questions (and we actually know the answers), we’ll be happy to field them in the comments area.

Showing 9 comments

Doug Kueffler at 5:36am 10th November 2011 One of Bezo's slides say "Test drive. Try before you buy." How does that work? Can you order one through Amazon and return it?
Doug Kueffler at 5:33am 10th November 2011 Does the Fire have a USB port? If so, is it possible to connect it to the internet through a smartphone?
primetrader4000 at 1:07pm 9th November 2011 A little confused I currently own a basic kindle and looking to upgrade (finding I'm looking to get connected to the web more often and I'm not always in a wireless network area) does the kindle fire have free 3g
1. Jeffrey Van Camp at 5:42pm 9th November 2011 Nope. It's Wi-Fi only, no 3G. To get the net, you'll have to connect it to your home network or hit up places with free Wi-Fi like Starbucks and some McDonald's. The only reason the old Kindle came with 3G was that they knew, due to the nature of the device, that you wouldn't be using much data unless you were downloading a book or purchasing something from Amazon. Perhaps that concept will come back someday, but currently wireless costs are too high to support it on a tablet-like device.
Frederick Lee at 12:57pm 4th October 2011 The Kindle Fire (with Amazon Prime) streams movies, etc in the US. Will Amazon Prime still work if you travel to other countries?
1. Jeffrey Van Camp at 2:53pm 4th October 2011 Depending on the country maybe, but movies and books are more strict than music. Amazon reps said that if you are going out of the country, they recommend downloading your music to the device that you want to take with you.
Richard English at 4:34pm 28th September 2011 Expandable memory?
1. Jeffrey Van Camp at 9:46pm 28th September 2011 Amazon made a point that everything on the tablet will be auto backed up to the cloud by default over and over. There is no microSD or expandable memory though. 8GB is what you get.
  1. Ian Bell at 1:48pm 9th November 2011 That sucks. Backing up just means a copy goes to them, not that you get extra storage on the web. I wish they had an SD card slot on it. :(