When Amazon initially announced its new Kindle Fire HD lineup, the company also announced it was rebooting its Kindle 4th generation and original Kindle Fire with updated specs. This marked one of the first times Amazon has ever revised devices with new hardware to appeal to multiple price points.
The Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7 features a seven inch IPS display with 1,280 x 800 pixels. It offers an amazing viewing experience and the ability to watch 720p movies right on the unit. Underneath the hood is a 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP4460 processor and 1 GB of RAM, which makes accessing media, books, and other content very fast and easy.
One of the best aspects of this model is the fact that it has twin stereo speakers with Dolby Surround Sound technology. It is seriously the loudest tablet I have ever used! The speakers themselves are on the back of the unit, wrapping up the left and right sides. Even if the Kindle Fire HD is lying flat on its back, you still get amazing sound. When we conducted tests with the Kobo Arc, Playbook, iPad 3, and Acer Iconia A100, the Fire blew them all away. Sounds are clear and crisp whether you are listening to music, video, or audiobooks. It rivaled cheap external PC speakers in its ability to make the whole room swim in music. If you are a serious audiophile, this tablet is the device to beat for tablet audio functionality.
Meanwhile, the rebooted Amazon Kindle Fire has double the RAM, a faster processor by over 40%, and battery life that lasts ten hours. The resolution is 1024×600 and runs a 1.2 Dual Core Processor, along with 1 GB of RAM. The menus and navigation have also been mirrored off of the new model, so you gain a bit of a homogenization between both devices.
In this video we compare both the hardware and software to give you all the information you need on how these tablets compare against each other. We show videos, music, ebooks, games, internet experience, and much more!
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
