On 28 September, Amazon.com’s boss, Jeff Bezos unveiled a tablet computer called the Kindle Fire, which will be available from mid-November in the US. Many expect the new tablet to compete well with established products like B&N’s Nook Color tablet and Apple’s iPad. The new Amazon tablet has a somewhat smaller screen than the iPad and only offers Wi-Fi connectivity, but will cost just $199. That is far less than the cheapest iPad, a Wi-Fi-only device which costs $499. B&N have responded to the Kindle Fire by cutting the price of its Nook Color to $224. Amazon also rolled out a new range of Kindle e-readers, the cheapest of which costs just $79.

“We are building premium products and offering them at non-premium prices,” said Mr Bezos. Amazon’s decision to undercut its rivals is partly a tactic designed to disrupt the tablet market, which is still dominated by the iPad. This successful e-tailer counts that its cheap tablet will be wildly popular and therefore boost sales of Amazon’s cloud-based content, just as the Kindle e-reader boosted sales of e-books. It’s like free parking outside Walmart — you want potential customers to see what’s in the window.

The Kindle Fire has a 7″ vibrant colour touchscreen that delivers 16 million colours in high resolution. You can use it to view movies or read magazines and children’s books. Over 100,000 movies and TV shows, including thousands of new releases are available to stream or download, purchase or rent.

This tablet gives you free storage for all your Amazon digital content in the Amazon Cloud. With the Kindle Fire you can use Amazon Silk, a revolutionary cloud-accelerated browser based on “split browser” architecture to leverage the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud. When a tablet user goes to a website, an Amazon cloud computer will do all the grunt work in loading the page and then zaps only the information that is needed back to the tablet.