Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the new Kindle Fire tablet. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Amazon just announced the "Kindle Fire"...a new tablet that leverages a new type of web browser called Silk.

The Amazon's Kindle Fire is a smallish tablet with a 7" display, a dual-core processor, multi-touch interface and is priced at $199. Amazon Jeff Bezos indicates that they are clearly providing a robust platform for half the price of an iPad or Android Tablets.  Now this is a tablet without a camera, microphone nor 3G connectivity, instead this platform communicates on the Whispersync of the original Kindle or wi-fi.

It is clearly a platform designed to consume content as opposed to generate it. It leverages a wi-fi connection to maintain high-speed connectivity and leverages the power of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform for computational computing muscle and storage.

The all-new Silk browser leverages the tablet and cloud computing architecture to split your web browser workload. The concept of cloud computing is something Amazon has spent a great deal of time developing. Their EC2 platform is leveraged by a great many companies today to provide web services and applications and the Kindle Fire and Silk browser take advantage of the cloud to provide predictive outcomes to speed up your web surfing efforts.

Combined, the Kindle Fire, Silk browser, a substantial library of downloadable content (music, movies, books, magazines and games) and online computing results in Amazon having built a viable platform for those seeking as simple, managed content library and online experience. All your content can be streamed to your Kindle Fire from Amazon's EC2 cloud and there are options for downloading to the device for offline access. Amazon has 17 million songs, over a million books and hundreds of magazines and 100,000 movies and TV shows. Amazon's AppStore has thousands of applications that are already compatible with the Kindle Fire as well.

All and all, a compelling package. I can definitely see a consumer demand for this product. It will be interesting to see just how much demand. Will a current Kindle consumer upgrade? Definitely looking forward to checking this out when it is commercially available starting on November 15th.

Here is some details about the Kindle's Silk browser and cloud computing architecture...