Following Barnes & Noble’s scathing attack on the Kindle Fire during its Nook Tablet unveiling, Amazon has hit back with its own Kindle Fire press release. Today, the online retailer announced its lineup of launch apps for the Kindle Fire. Among them are Netflix, Pandora, and a number of other apps that were thought to be strengths of the Nook Tablet. It looks like those in the market for an e-reader tablet this holiday season (or we could call it a “half-tablet”) can take a few check marks off the Nook’s list of advantages.
The Kindle Fire will come with apps for Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, Rhapsody, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, The Weather Channel, and select games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap, and Rovio. This means it will undoubtedly have Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, some of Gameloft’s unoriginal 3D games, CityVille, and whatever EA cooks up. Amazon also said that Allrecipes, Bloomberg, Cut the Rope, Doodle Fit, Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, Jenga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Airport Mania, Battleheart, Pulse, The Cat in the Hat, Quickoffice Pro, Jamie’s 20-Minute Meals, IMDb Movies & TV, and Monkey Preschool Lunchbox will be available for the tablet.
“We started talking to app developers everywhere the day we introduced Kindle Fire, and the response has been overwhelming,” Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “In addition to over 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, and magazines from Amazon, we are excited to offer customers thousands of apps and games to choose from on Kindle Fire–from Pandora and Rhapsody to Facebook and Twitter to Netflix, as well as popular games from EA, Zynga and many other top game developers. And this is only the beginning–we’re adding more apps and games every day across all categories.”
Game on. While the Nook still has a small advantage since it has Hulu Plus support, it looks like both tablets will have a good assortment of apps and games at launch. That leaves other categories to worry about. It’s looking like it might come down to storage space and RAM. The Nook Tablet has more of both, but they come at a price: $50 extra dollars. Check out our first impressions of the Nook Tablet and first impressions of the Kindle Fire. We also made a spec comparison chart between the two devices.
