Yes, Amazon's Kindle Fire is a $199 Android tablet

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up Kindle Fire

Mark Lennihan / AP

The Kindle Fire is shown at a news conference, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011 in New York. The e-reader and tablet has a 7-inch (17.78 cm) multicolor touchscreen and will go on sale for $199 on Nov. 15.

By Wilson Rothman

Before Amazon's press event even started, the big news slipped out of the bag: The Amazon Kindle Fire will be a 7-inch Android tablet with a $199 price tag. Then Amazon's Jeff Bezos went on stage and unveiled it, showing off its movie playback capability and other media features.

As rumors had suggested, it is very reminiscent of the $499 BlackBerry PlayBook, though the bezel looks a little narrower. It weighs 14.6 ounces, pretty much exactly the same as the PlayBook.

msnbc.com

In fact, we managed to get a quick shot of the Kindle Fire alongside a PlayBook. As you can see, at right, the Kindle Fire is a little bit more sleekly styled than RIM's far more expensive tablet, but they are hauntingly similar, hardware-wise.

But unlike the BlackBerry tablet or the many struggling Android tablets on the market, Amazon gives you many many reasons, right up front, as to why this tablet matters. As Amazon puts it: "18 million songs, movies, TV shows, books, magazines, apps and games." Not that you get all of those free with purchase, but the device is purpose-built as a conduit for media, whether you pay for an Amazon Prime streaming subscription, subscribe to periodicals or buy books, music or movies a la carte.

As had been foretold, the Kindle Fire has a dual-core processor and a pretty nice custom interface. It does not look anything like a Google-authorized Android tablet, but the tablet plays Android games fairly well — at least in the canned demonstrations shown today.

Part of the reason that the cost can be kept low is that the tablet has just 8 gigabytes of internal storage, half of the baseline storage of most tablets. Amazon expects people to use the tablet mostly in Wi-Fi hotspots, where they can stream content from Amazon's cloud.

The tablet will be available Nov. 15, but you can pre-order it now.