Kindle Fire Gets More Fire

Apparently the next gen Kindle Fire will be getting a whole bunch more horsepower under the hood.

H/T bgr.com

Beginning with the upcoming new 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet, we already reported that the slate will feature a high-resolution 1,920 x 1,200-pixel display and a new design, and now we can fill in the blanks. We’re told the tablet will be powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) system on a chip, which includes four Krait 400 CPUs and Adreno 330 graphics. Prototypes are said to be clocked at about 2GHz.

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The new 7-inch Kindle Fire HD set to launch later this year also includes an upgrade to 2GB of RAM, a front-facing camera, Wi-Fi and available cellular connectivity. It will ship with either 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of internal storage according to our sources, and internal test units are currently running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with Amazon’s heavy customizations. Considering how close we are to Amazon’s target launch timeframe, this will likely be the device’s operating system version at launch.

Well dang. To translate the tech talk into regular people speech, they are getting much faster and can hold a bunch more stuff. I’d be interested in what kind of battery life they can sustain but overall, this tablet is a valid competitor to using iPads in school. I didn’t see the price point but it would almost certainly still be a lot cheaper than an iPad. The Android app store has also gotten a lot better but in my opinion is still not as polished as Apple’s App Store. People don’t pay for the best if the next best is good enough and much cheaper. Computers and phones and tablets are always in a race to the bottom.

I know a lot of educators are Apple fans and have been forever, but a lot of your students will be showing up this fall with these new, powerful tablets. If you are a teacher trying to incorporate tech into your lessons, I would encourage you to keep the Android based platforms in mind too. If you need help, ask one of the kids. 🙂