Amazon's New Kindle Fires Land in a More Competitive Tablet Market

There’s an easy way to anticipate when Amazon.com is about to unveil a new Kindle Fire tablet: It’s virtually the only time the company’s home page, some of the most valuable real estate on the Web, isn’t advertising the tablet’s previous iterations. That was the case in the couple of days leading up to Sept. 25, when Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos released details on three new versions of the Kindle Fire. It’s Bezos’s most serious strike yet at other tablets—including Apple’s dominant iPad line—but seriousness and success do not necessarily go hand in hand.

For the last two years, Amazon has scraped and clawed its way to a modest position in the exploding tablet market. The Internet’s largest retailer and maker of the iconic black-and-white Kindle e-reader gave consumers an elegant way to access Amazon’s virtual store, including its lucrative music and video streaming services. It started with the original 7-inch Kindle Fire in 2011, followed last year by two sizes of a version with a high-definition screen.