Arriving a little earlier than we expected, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is now available on the Amazon store and at Best Buy for US buyers, anywhere else will have to wait a little before seeing this device. Kindle Fire HD 8.9 was originally meant to ship on November 20, but it seems we’ve had the good fortune of Amazon releasing it five days early.
Kindle Fire HD 8.9 LTE version is still on the waiting list, although Amazon have assured us that it will be coming on November 20, the same time that the non-LTE version was meant to arrive. We believe Amazon are looking to get as many sales over the Christmas season as they possibly can, and arriving five days earlier may snatch a few more.
The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 was revealed at the Amazon Event a few months ago, alongside the Kindle Fire HD 7.0 and the Kindle Paperwhite. Jeff Bezos seemed to have the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 take the standing point as Amazon’s flagship tablet device, with many of the new features Amazon and Kindle teams have been working on going into the Kindle Fire HD 8.9.
Starting at $299, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is still a very cheap tablet, especially since it seems to be competing with the iPad. The LTE version starts at $499, a large price step, but still very cheap compared to the cheapest iPad 4 with LTE, at $629.
There has been criticism of Amazon’s LTE offering, at $50 a year, saying it is not enough to stream one movie, nevermind the endless features Bezos wanted you to try out.
AT&T is giving Amazon these 4G packages and the first one, at $50 a year, comes with only 250MB’s of data per month, something we wouldn’t recommend to users that use LTE a lot to get. We believe 5GB’s is a recommended amount of 4G per month, anything lower and you may see yourself going over the limits.
Benefits of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 are the 1,920×1,200 HD display with 254ppi that gives incredible movie and image quality, the HD front-facing camera, dual-stereo speakers for enhanced audio, 20GB’s of free Amazon Cloud storage and Kindle’s unique operating system.
If you are looking for a tablet between the sizes of the iPad and the iPad Mini, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 seems like a perfect fit. With Amazon’s huge store, you will never find yourself complaining about not finding the right book, movie, TV program, magazine, but you may question where all the apps are.