Amazon has finally collapsed the waveform and declared its intentions to compete head-on with the likes of the iPad in the tablet market with the Kindle Fire, a new entry in the company's highly successful Kindle eReader product line.

While the device isn't yet available in the UK, it was unveiled at a US press event last night along with a headline-grabbing price of just $199. We take a look at the figures to see if Amazon's gamble will pay off.

If you've ever seen Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook, then you know the rough design of the Kindle Fire: created by Quanta, the original design manufacturer responsible for the PlayBook, the two devices are near-indistinguishable side-by-side.

Unlike previous Kindle devices, which have used greyscale E-Ink electrophoretic displays, the Kindle Fire is a true tablet with a full-colour seven-inch LCD screen featuring a resolution of 1024x600 - roughly par for the course in the tablet world.

While the Kindle Fire includes a dual-core ARM-based processor, the company is keeping quiet on precise specifications leading industry experts to suggest that the specification has been dropped from the 1GHz model used in the PlayBook. A lack of cameras and half the storage has also allowed Quanta to make the Kindle Fire lighter than its inspiration: despite being slightly thicker than the PlayBook, the Kindle Fire weighs 414g - around 8.5g lighter.

The Kindle Fire runs on an unspecified build of Google's Android platform, which has been heavily customised by Amazon to encourage users to pay for content from its own app store and the Kindle eBook service. This is part of Amazon's key gamble: it's estimated that the company is losing around $50 on the sale of each Kindle Fire, meaning that it needs to make money on content sales if it wants to stay in business.

As a result, Amazon has announced that all Kindle Fire buyers will get a 30-day trial of Amazon Prime, a free delivery service normally costing $79 a year which also includes the delivery of streaming video content to the tablet - something the original book-oriented Kindle models can't offer.

As a tablet, there's little to recommend the Kindle Fire: with no cameras, GPS, 3G connectivity, Bluetooth, or HDMI output, many of the things that a user might want a tablet for are simply not possible with the Kindle Fire. It's the price that's key, however: at $199, Amazon has undercut its nearest competitor - by Nook Color from rival bookseller Barnes & Nobel, which is also based on Google's Android platform - by a handy $50.

If your main desire in a tablet is to consume content loaded onto the device while you're within range of a wireless hotspot, then the Kindle Fire is a great choice and easily surpasses other budget Android tablets with typically poor screens and slow processors. For the more advanced user, however, the lack of additional capabilities will likely prove restrictive.

The Kindle Fire has another trick up its sleeve, however: a new browser architecture called 'Silk,' which ties in to Amazon's cloud-based Elastic Compute Cloud for heavy processing. As a result, complex websites are pre-rendered using Amazon's server farm - meaning that the cut-down processor shouldn't mean that web browsing is a painful experience. It's a clever concept, but one which will require time and testing to see if it really delivers on Amazon's promises.

Sadly, Amazon has yet to indicate when the Kindle Fire is coming to the UK, but as soon as we get our hands on one we'll be sure to bring you a full review.

KEY FACTS:

Display: Seven-inch 1024x600 LCD multitouch
Processor: Dual-core ARM-based application processor
Memory: Not officially revealed, believed to be 512MB
Operating System: Customised version of Google Android
Storage: 8GB, no expansion
Connectivity: Wi-Fi
Weight: 414g
Size: 190 mm x 120 mm x 11.4 mm
Ports: USB 2.0 microUSB, 3.5mm stereo audio output
Battery: Lithium-ion, 8 hours of continuous usage

Tags: kindle amazon android fire tablet