Why I bought an Amazon Fire

Amazon introduced its touchscreen, Android-powered (kind of) Kindle Fire earlier this week. I immediately went to its Amazon Product page, hit the Buy with 1 Click button, and pre-ordered it for delivery when its ready in November. The Amazon tablet appealed to me more than any other device in this class since the original iPad.

One of the awesome perks of this job is that I get a ton of new toys to play with and I literally have a stack of about a dozen tablets in my office. An iPad sits with a TouchPad that’s next to a Transformer that’s tucked under a View 4G; and so on and so on. But there was something different about the Kindle Fire which made me spend my hard-earned dollars on it: the Amazon ecosystem.

The one tech company that gets the most money from me overall is Amazon because I’m an Amazon Prime member and I do a ton of shopping on the site. I routinely buy electronics, bulk food, household goods, and even shoes. (Through Amazon-owned Zappos.) Amazon and the mobile apps make it even easier for me to spend my money the minute I think I need something. The free, two-day shipping that comes with Prime is well worth the $80 a month.

It’s not just physical goods. All of my music purchases go through Amazon because it was DRM-free before iTunes, my e-books are purchased through Kindle and that Prime membership lets me tap into the videos from Amazon’s Video On Demand service. Having all of those services and shopping capabilities on one optimized, 7-inch device with strong cloud integration is a no-brainer for me.

The Silk browser may seem like the cherry on top but this cloud-powered browser may actually be the best part of the Kindle Fire. This will leverage Amazon’s incredible scale to deliver pages more efficiently and while there are some privacy concerns, I believe this will make the device feel fresh for years to come.

The price is really what put me over the top. I don’t really need another tablet, but for $200, I can justify the price. Heck, if it provides a great movie-watching experience on a plane, it will pay for itself after two or three airline trips.

Would you drop $200 to buy a Kindle Fire? Why or why not? Let KYC know what you think!