14 DAY TRIAL // Now that Amazon is shipping the Kindle Fire to its customers, the company started to plan for the second version of this tablet and has already placed orders for the second-gen Fire that is expected to ship in Q2 of 2012.
According to a Chinese-language Apple Daily report cited by DigiTimes, Amazon has contracted Quanta for building this new tablet.
No information regarding the specs of the next-gen Kindle Fire are available at this time except the fact that is going to feature a 7-inch screen, but Amazon is expected to address some of the issues reported in the first reviews of its tablet.
Most of these have complained about the sluggish performance of the Kindle Fire, and also on the lack of more advanced features such as HDMI out, GPS, 3G option or front and rear cameras.
Of course that adding some of these features to the second-generation Kindle Fire will also increase its price, but Amazon has still room left in this area as the current Fire retails for just $200 (roughly 146 Euros), making it one of the cheapest tablets available.
Amazon unveiled the Kindle Fire on September 28 and the tablet is based on a customized version of Android, that comes with an unique interface to detach itself form all the other tablets out there running this OS.
In this new UI, multitasking apps can be accessed and controlled from a drop-down menu found at the top of the screen, while Web pages are viewed using the Amazon Silk browser rather than the standard Android browser.
Hardware wise, the Fire has a 7-inch IPS screen with a 1024x600 resolution, Gorilla Glass coating, a dual-core TI OMAP processor, and all of these are fitted inside a chassis that weighs 14.6 ounces (roughly 413 grams).