The Kindle Fire is one smooth tablet PC. The smooth reference comes from Amazon’s revolutionary Silk browser that was purpose built just for the Kindle Fire, the newest entry into Amazon’s already formidable lineup of tablet readers. The Silk browser (as in smooth as silk) gets it’s power from the use of Amazon’s cloud servers.
For those less technically inclined, the cloud is just a fancy name for Amazon’s huge racks of web servers arrayed all over the world. They do Amazon’s processing for it’s ecommerce needs, and also all kinds of third party stuff like web hosting, etc. I am assuming when you are as large as Amazon is, you have the knowledge and the price advantage to really scale your web server needs. And because they simply can’t ever go down, they have tons of built in redundancy. So they take that leverage and can use it to help things like the Kindle Fire.
The Kindle Fire uses the Amazon cloud servers for two things. One is the Silk browser and it’s “cloud assist”. Again a fancy name for something that is pretty understandable. When your browser on any device wants to view something on the web, it has to do many things to get that page rendered. I think I read that some pages can take up to 80 back and forth communications between your machine and the remote servers to render that page fully.
So what Amazon did (and it’s really revolutionary) is to encrypt your request from the Fire and send it up to the cloud assist servers. Once there, the cloud servers do all the heavy lifting in the requests, DNS lookups, etc. When all the information is gathered, The servers encrypt it and send it back to you. Now I realize that the new tablets like the Fire have dual core processors and with fast wifi it seems like you wouldn’t need cloud assist. But if you have ever used a top end workstation on a big fat 16 Mb Charter pipeline, you know there is no comparison. So Amazon and the Silk browser leverage their huge cloud resources to mimic that type of horsepower. So your browsing is really snappy even when you at Starbux on a Saturday morning with 100 of your closest friends sharing their relatively slow wifi connection. Wifi while fast under ideal connections rarely is in real life. So the Silk browser comes in handy.
The next asset you get with the Kindle Fire is unlimited storage on the Amazon cloud servers for all you content. That’s right I said unlimited. Unlimited as in eat as much as you want, and never worry about it getting deleted, corrupted, lost, etc. It’s there, it’s backed up and will never go away. With your Kindle Fire you have access whenever you want wherever you want. And Amazon manages the backups, etc.
The Kindle Fire also has 8 Gb of onboard storage. You will here that the iPad 2 has 16 Gb of storage, and that is true. But when you compare 16 Gb of onboard (and easily lost) storage to unlimited cloud storage, it seems kind of impotent on Apple’s part. Throw in the snappy browsing from the cloud assist Silk browser and you’ve got one nice piece of hardware.
To top it off the Kindle Fire comes at $199 fully equipped. The iPad starts at $499 and goes up from there. You do the math. Buy two Kindle Fires, and have an extra $100 to take out your girlfriend/boyfriend to dinner. Or buy a pair of shoes. A pair of nice shoes and two Kindle Fires for the same price as one iPad 2. Wow, it seems like they are giving them away.
The fully equipped $199 Kindle Fire.