Amazon Kindle Fire tablet to be available in 170 more countries, but still no love for India

Amazon has announced that it will be offering its 7-inch and 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablets to customers in over 170 additional countries, but India still gets a cold shoulder.

Nikhil Subramaniam|May 23, 2013, 17:00:53 IST

Amazon has announced that it will be offering its 7-inch and 8.9-inch Android-based Kindle Fire HD tablets to customers in over 170 additional countries. The tablets are expected to start shipping from June 13 onwards.

Disappointingly, there is no way you can pre-order the tablet for India. We tried out Amazon.com (the international site), Amazon.co.uk, as well as Junglee.com, the company’s site for India, and could not complete the order process of shipping a 7-inch Kindle Fire HD to India. Junglee.com does not even show the availability of the Kindle Fire devices. Amazon eats its words. Will remove ads for $15

Amazon eats its words. Will remove ads for $15

Amazon Kindle Fire HD still not official in India

For potential buyers in countries where the device is available, the specs remain unchanged from the model currently shipping. The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD comes with a 1920 x 1200 full HD display with a pixel density of 254 ppi. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HD features a 1280 x 800 screen resolution.

The 8.9-inch tablet is powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz OMAP4 4470 processor and has an Imagination SGX544 GPU that's proven to be quite a capable graphics processor. The processor in the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD is a relatively low-powered dual-core OMAP4 4460 clocked at 1.2GHz processor.

Despite the Kindle Fire HD being an Android tablet, the UI of the tablet is totally different from most other Android slates. The Kindle Fire HD runs a forked version of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.4) with access to the Appstore and not Google’s Play Store. Thankfully, Indians can make use of the Appstore, which is now available for the country as part of its launch in over 200 countries.

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