Amazon to take on Apple iPad with new Kindle Fire tablet

Amazon has announced details of its new tablet computer, the Kindle Fire.

The 7in tablet has a full colour screen and 8GB of internal storage. Unlike a lot of other tablets, it does a lot of its work in the cloud.

At present, Amazon has said it only plans to release the Kindle Fire in the USA. Speaking to Computeractive, an Amazon spokesperson said the company had only announced the £89 Kindle ebook reader for the UK. Amazon refused to confirm if the other new Kindle products would come to the UK.

The Kindle Fire will come with free cloud storage for all Amazon content such as books, movies and music purchased from the Amazon store. The Kindle Fire also has a dual-core processor, and will weigh 413g with a screen resolution of 1024x600 pixels.

The Kindle Fire will only support Wifi internet, with no 3G model currently planned.

The Kindle Fire will also use a specially developed web browser called Amazon Silk, and the Silk browser will use Amazon's own servers. By doing this, as well as moving a lot of processes to the cloud, Amazon hopes to speed up browser performance and load time.

Amazon is promising eight hours of continues reading or 7.5 hours of video playback with the wireless connection turned off. Apps, music, movies and games can all be accessed via the Amazon store, with the company saying it will test every application on the Kindle Fire before they are available.

The Kindle Fire will launch in the USA from 15 November for $199.