Not only did Amazon give a little love to their e-ink based Kindle Lineup, they’ve also overhauled the Kindle Fire lineup as well. This involves updating the 7″ Kindle Fire, with a “new faster processor” (presumably dual-core), double the RAM, and longer battery life, and an amazing new price of $159 – which is the absolute lowest price for a high end tablet on the market.

Next and most notably, Amazon has announced a new addition to the Kindle Fire family, the Kindle Fire HD. The Kindle Fire HD features an 8.9″ display, with a 1920×1200 display – making this undoubtably a “Retina display” in Apple lingo. It has a TI OMAP 4470 processor, which apparently has 40% more memory bandwidth then the nearest competitor, the Tegra 3. It’s also got Dolby Digital Plus stereo speakers, 16GB of internal storage, and dual 5GHz band wi-fi antennas. Also included is a new tech called “MIMO”, which uses the unit’s processing power to improve signal strength, from what we can tell.

Both Kindle Fire’s will also get updated software, featuring a new default Facebook application that finally replaces the old HTML bookmark, a new email client, Skype HD integration, syncing for games between devices, X-Ray for movies that allows you to look up IMDB information via an overlay on top of the movie playing, and enhanced parental controls with a new Amazon FreeTime app that allows for user account support (which Android and iOS both sorely need).

The Kindle Fire HD will be priced at $299, coming soon. There’ll also be a 4G LTE capable model coming for $499, with a $49.99 annual (that’s yearly, not monthly) price tag.

Via: The Verge