Amazon Announces Variety of Apps for Kindle Fire

With less than one week until the launch of Amazon’s first tablet, Kindle Fire, the electronic commerce giant has announced that several popular Android apps will be available for the new tab upon its release.

Kindle Fire features a 7-inch multi-touch display with a 1 GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4 dual-core processor, 8 GB storage capacity, 512 MB memory, a 14.6 ounce design, 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity, and Amazon’s new Web broswer Amazon Silk. It will run a unique version of Android’s 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, and will now offer a number of popular apps.

Some of the popular apps that will be available upon the release of Kindle Fire include Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, Twitter, Rhapsody, The Weather Channel, Comics by comiXology, and popular games by Zynga, Rovio, EA, Gameloft, and PopCap.

“We started talking to app developers everywhere the day we introduced Kindle Fire, and the response has been overwhelming,” said Dave Limp, Vice President of Kindle Fire. “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.”

Kindle Fire users will be able to download the apps using Amazon’s 1-Click payment technology, and won’t have to register multiple times when downloading apps. Once downloading an app from the Amazon Appstore, it can be used on Kindle Fire as well as other Android-based gadgets.

EA, Zynga, Gameloft, Pandora, Netflix, PopCap Games, Rhapsody and The Weather Channel have all showed their enthusiasm for contributing content to the Kindle Fire. Other available apps and games announced include Bloomberg, Doodle Jump, Doodle Fit, Fruit Ninja, Jenga, LinkedIn, Quickoffice Pro, IMDb Movies & TV, Zillow, Airport Mania, Cut the Rope, and more.

Kindle Fire will be released November 15 for $199, and can be pre-ordered here.

Barnes & Noble also recently announced content that will be available for its Kindle Fire competitor, NOOK Tablet. According to Barnes & Noble, its tablet, which will be released one day after the Kindle Fire, will also offer multimedia such as Netflix, Pandora and Hulu. The NOOK Tablet also offers a larger selection of books, newspapers and magazines, but comes at a price of $249 — $50 more than the Kindle Fire.