Amazon is making no bones about its belief that the Kindle Fire HD is superior to the iPad mini, especially when talking about the tablet’s price tag. Its latest advertisement has underscored this belief, openly comparing the Kindle Fire HD with Apple’s new 7.9-inch tablet, which will cost $130 more than the cheapest Fire HD at $329 upwards.
The comparison ad touts the Kindle Fire HD as a tablet that offers “much more for much less,” focusing on the device’s strengths. These strengths, as outlined, are a “stunning” HD display with a greater pixel resolution and density than the non-Retina Display iPad mini. This is accurate, as the Fire HD’s display has a pixels-per-inch rating of 216, compared to the mini’s 163 ppi density. The Fire HD would also allow users to watch high-definition movies, videos and TV programs and listen to music on dual stereo speakers; the mini indeed doesn’t support HD viewing and only comes with one mono speaker. Lastly, the Fire HD’s “ultra-fast MIMO Wi-Fi” is listed as another strong area. Curiously, it failed to mention that the iPad mini doesn’t just support Wi-Fi, but some versions of the smaller tablet offer 4G LTE as well.
Despite the accurate list of strong points, the iPad mini is looking as early as now as a potential success on the sales charts. Some variants of the tablet are now listed as taking two weeks to ship, and this had occurred just a few minutes after Apple opened pre-orders for the device. Aside from 4G LTE on some models, the iPad mini’s main advantages over the Fire HD are its twin cameras, including a 5-megapixel shooter at the rear, and an ultra-slim, ultra-light design that makes the mini easy to use with one hand.
