Wow. The Amazon Kindle Fire is a very impressive tablet, especially for $200. At the Fire's launch, Amazon didn't let us touch the units much, but we got to watch a bunch of close-up demos and ask some pointed questions.

The Kindle Fire is a great size for one-handed use, with a soft-touch back. Yes, this tablet superficially looks like the BlackBerry PlayBook, but that's good; the PlayBook is also very easy to hold. Also like the PlayBook, the Fire has a large bezel around a 7-inch, 1024-by-600 IPS LCD screen. But there's no camera here, and the bezel isn't touch-sensitive. This is a much simpler, easier to understand tablet.

The Fire's screen is glossy, but super-sharp. I had some trouble with reflections from bright lights when I was photographing it, so I'm a little worried about glare outdoors. But it has a higher pixel density than the iPad 2 and most other tablets nowadays, so text looks very well-formed. There are stereo speakers on the bottom and a headphone jack on the top, but no physical buttons on the front; the Home and Back buttons are in software.

The Fire's main UI is organized like a bookshelf. At the top, there's a search bar, and then links to the main categories of content: magazines, books, music, video, personal documents, apps, and the Web. This is definitely a media-consumption tablet, not a general purpose productivity tablet like the Apple iPad or some of the larger Android devices. There's 8GB of storage on board, plus everything you own is backed up in the cloud and you can swap content in and out over Wi-Fi networks.

Below the top bar, you'll find big icons showing the most recent things you've done, like read books or played games, and below that, user-configurable favorites.

Turn the Fire sideways, and the interface becomes a Cover Flow-like rotator of recent content.

You read books and magazines through the Kindle app, which works just like every other Kindle app—it actually is the Android 2.3 Kindle app. The music player looks a lot like the standard Android music playback app. The video player is simple, with large control icons. I didn't get to see the Docs section. For apps, you have Amazon's Android app store, with thousands of apps but nowhere near the sheer number in the Android Market.

The Silk Web browser is based on WebKit like the standard Android browser, but it uses Amazon's EC2 cloud technology to seriously speed up page loads. The browser opens up with visual thumbnail bookmarks, and loads complex pages including DHTML and Flash 10.3. I saw a demo where one page had an HTML rotator, and another had a Flash banner, and both loaded and displayed pretty speedily. Some of that speed is definitely due to Amazon's optimizations, but some of it is the 1-Ghz, dual-core TI OMAP4 processor.

According to tech writer Rob Pegoraro, the Kindle Fire will have email and contacts, but no calendar. I didn't see where any of those would fit in the UI they were showing off; maybe under "Apps?" It wasn't at all clear.

Amazon Holds Your Hand
Amazon made a big deal about the Kindle Fire being an end-to-end experience. Yes, you can sideload Android apps using a USB cable and mass storage, but this is a Kindle first and foremost. The color screen is for showing off magazines beautifully, displaying color children's books, watching TV shows, browsing the Web and playing casual games. This isn't a business tablet or (especially since it's Wi-Fi only) a smartphone replacement.

Amazon's heavily hacked Android 2.3 UI gets many things right, though. It's immediately clear what this tablet is for. It's immediately clear how to do those things. Those two aspects aren't at all clear with most Android tablets, which step up shouting "we do everything!" but help the user with nothing.

The press experience with the Kindle Fire was incomplete, and Amazon didn't want us to get too close to some of the features. That leaves me a bit cautious - I remember how good the BlackBerry PlayBook demos looked - but I'm going to remain hopeful. I'm looking forward to spending more time with the Fire when I finally get to review it in November.

For more, see Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 vs. Nook Color: Specs and Features Compared, as well as PCMag's live blog of the event. Also check out the slideshow below for more images from today's press event.