Online retail giant Amazon. com on Wednesday unveiled a tablet computer called Kindle Fire, its answer to Apple's popular iPad.
The Kindle Fire retails for 199 U.S. dollars, less than half the price of the iPad, which starts at 499 dollars.
"We're building premium products at non-premium prices," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at a press event in New York that was live blogged by several U.S. news sites.
The tablet will ship on Nov. 15, Bezos announced, saying that " we're making many millions of these, but I still recommend you pre- order today."
According to a press release from Amazon, the Kindle Fire weighs 14.6 ounces (about 413 grams) and features a 7-inch (about 17.8 centimeters) full color LCD touch screen, smaller than iPad's 9.7-inch display.
The tablet, which doesn't have a camera or microphone, is powered by a dual-core processor and offers Wi-Fi connectivity but not 3G access.
Amazon said the new device will give users a faster web browsing experience, thanks to an all-new Amazon Silk web browser, which is available exclusively on Kindle Fire.
Amazon Silk deploys a "split" architecture and can make a dynamic decision on which of the subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely on Amazon's cloud computing platform each time users load a web page.
While introducing the Kindle Fire, Amazon also touted some 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books that the online retailer can offer on the new device.
The new tablet will come with a one-month free trial of Amazon Prime, a membership service that costs 79 U.S. dollars a year and offers members free two-day shipping on million of items Amazon sells and unlimited streaming of over 11,000 movies and TV shows.
Like Amazon's other Kindle electronic readers (e-readers), the Kindle Fire also offers free cloud storage for all of users' Amazon digital content.
In addition to Kindle Fire, Amazon on Wednesday unveiled three new Kindle e-readers that are smaller, lighter and cheaper than previous products.
Among them are a "Kindle Touch" with touch screen at 99 dollars, and a "Kindle Touch 3G" with free 3G connectivity sold at 149 dollars.
Amazon also unveiled a non-touch-screen Kindle that has built- in Wi-Fi connectivity and is priced as low as 79 dollars.
Some analysts say a tablet from Amazon has the potential to challenge the dominant iPad with the support of Amazon's strong e- commerce platform.
A report released in August by market research firm Forrester said that Amazon could become Apple's top competitor in the tablet market.
If launched at the right price with enough supply, Amazon's tablet could easily sell 3 million to 5 million units in the fourth quarter of this year, disrupting not only Apple's product strategy but other tablet manufacturers' as well, Forrester analysts then said.
In a blog post on Wednesday following the announcement of Kindle Fire, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said that as predicted, Amazon is indeed drawing on all its content and commerce assets including video, music, games, as well as magazines, apps and services.
The Kindle Fire is solidly a content consumption device, good for media, plus email and Web, said Epps, who contended Amazon still lacks a convincing global strategy compared with Apple, as the Kindle Fire will only be available in the United States at the launch, while the iPad is available in 64 countries and regions, with about 50 percent of iPad sales in 2011 estimated to be outside the U.S..
She said she didn't expect big companies would deploy the Amazon device the same way they have had with the iPad.
The Forrester analyst, however, predicted that Amazon will be able to sell millions of tablets within this year.
"Apple's place as market leader is secure, but Amazon will be a strong number two, and we expect no other serious tablet competitors until Windows 8 tablet's launch," she wrote in the blog post.
