Amazon introduces Fire color tablet with super-smart Silk browser

Amazon introduced four new devices today, including a $79 Kindle and a $199 color tablet called the Fire. As the name implies, the Fire, which may put the heat on Apple, is the culmination of Kindle and Amazon's Cloud and Instant Video offerings.

"From Kindle, Fire is born," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at a New York City event this morning, introducing a full-color tablet with a 7-inch multi-touch display, WiFi connectivity, a dual-core processor, access to movies, music, books and TV shows, slews of apps, free cloud storage, email and the Web, and a new "split-browser" architecture called Silk.

As expected, the device will retail for $199.

"We're building premium products at non-premium prices," Bezos said, as if anyone needed reminding that the least-expensive WiFi-only iPad starts at $499.

The iPad is of course 10 inches — a preferred size, according to some analysts and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs — to the Fire's 7 inches, and supports 10 hours of battery life to the Fire's 7.5, or 8 if you're just using it to read. But who would do that?

The Fire's big power play is its software-cloud one-two punch. The iPad doesn't want for competitors, but none have come near to offering the software ecosystem that Apple does. Until now.

Fire owners will have access to more than 1 million books, more than 100,000 movies and TV shows, 2 million plus out-of-copyright publications, 17 million songs and more. The device is the culmination of Amazon's experience with Kindle — the best-selling e-reader four years running, ahem — and its Cloud Drive, Cloud Player and Instant Video services.

Oh yes — Amazon, at the event, also introduced a new Kindle for $79 and two new Kindle Touch models, a Wi-Fi–only version for $99 and one with ("free," no-contract) 3G connectivity that works globally for $149.

Fire as a competitor to the iPad is a thing we'll no doubt hear plenty about in the coming months, and so too will Silk be a topic of note.

"Within the next 24 months, demand for broadband wireless will outstrip the current total spectrum available in the United States, jeopardizing everything from the smartphones and tablets we love to the emergency responder services we rely upon to keep us safe," LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja moaned in an open letter this week (CP: LightSquared tidies up GPS mess, ready to be the network 'all Americans deserve').

During a time when carriers are quick to point out a lack of spectrum amidst growing demand for streaming video, Silk will be an interesting contributor to such traffic. Its split nature means that work is being done in the cloud to save time for the user down below. In some instances, it anticipates — when a user is reading a newspaper, for example — which section they're likely to click next and will silently begin loading that, unbeknownst to the user.

"All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely," the Silk team explained in a blog post. (There's also a video worth watching.)

"In short," they added, "Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory and network connectivity of our cloud."

Streaming video from Netflix already accounts for 20% of Internet traffic, and Amazon, in recent weeks in particular, is proving a hard-core competitor. Should the Fire see holiday sales nearly as strong as those of Kindle in past years, Amazon and the carriers are going to have a memorable Christmas Day.