Amazon certainly came out swinging at their event today, first introducing a brand new Kindle with a Paperwhite display and a front lit screen, then by announcing the previous Kindle Fire would be beefed up in terms of specs, including a new 1.2GHz processor, twice the RAM which help produce better battery life and allows the Fire to run 40% faster than the previous version, all for $159. Lastly, Amazon announced their new “premium” line of tablets, the Kindle Fire HD, available with a 7-inch ($199) and a 8.9-inch display ($299), there’s also a third option for the Fire HD, an 8.9-inch model featuring 32GB of storage and 4G LTE (presumed to be with AT&T) for $499.
The previous Kindle Fire, released last November, was running on a heavily modified version of Google’s Android 2.3, Gingerbread. The new Kindle Fire HD’s, while also heavily modified, runs on Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. This news was confirmed to Slashgear, who after the event met up with an Amazon spokesperson who verified the OS running on the Kindle Fire HD. Slashgear said it wasn’t a topic that they wanted to really discuss, mainly because they are trying to separate themselves from Google, for obvious reasons.