Amazon Kindle Fire Comes With News 'Pulse'

Amazon's new Kindle Fire may feature thousands of apps but the news aggregation app, Pulse, will be the only pre-loaded app to come straight out of the box, Amazon has announced.

Amazon's new tablet that comes with an attractive $199 price tag, has fallen in direct competition with the iPad 2. By making Pulse the central news service of the device, Amazon has given its users a free option adjacent to its paid newsstand app.

Pulse is an easy to use news application that places stories from users favorite news sources and blogs into colorful easy-to-read bars for tablet interfaces.

Today is a big day for Pulse, the company wrote in a blog on their Website. After months of hard work, we are excited to announce our partnership with Amazon today. When you receive your Kindle Fire, you will see the Pulse logo right on your main screen. No need to visit the App Store, no need to download anything. Pulse will be available right out of the box -- just tap on the Pulse logo and get started.

When Pulse was launched on the iPad in June 2010 it topped the charts, allowing users to choose between reading full news articles directly from the web or text-only versions of the stories that automatically clears up the newsfeed.

Pulse was founded in May 2010 by Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari, two Stanford graduate students as part of a course at the Institute of Design. The inspiration for Pulse was born out of their frustration with the news reading experience on mobile devices.

Amazon has reported over one million pre-orders for its new tablet. Here are some of the tops features and apps for the Kindle Fire:

Top Features:

The Screen: It comes with a vibrant 7-inch color touchscreen that delivers 16 million colors in high resolution. It uses technology similar to that of the iPad to enable extra wide viewing angles.

Easy Spin, Easy use: The tablet uses a fast an effective quick touch component that brings the content you are looking for straight to your fingertips without having to wade through all your content.

Magazines in Rich Color: Magazines can be pulled up with their full glossy rich colors. Many of the magazines come with multimedia components that can easily be accessed straight from the Kindle Fire.

100,000 Movies and TV Shows: Thousands of new releases can be streamed, downloaded or rented with Amazon Prime members able to view commercial-free content.

Fast Dual-Core Processor: The Kindle Fire uses a fast state-of-the-art core processor for fast allowing users to multi-task and browse the web while listening to music or downloading videos.

Millions of Books: After all, Amazon started with selling books, now its tablet allows easy access to the Kindle Store where you can download your favorite bestsellers.

17 Million Songs: With books and videos come music. Music can be streamed from Amazon's Cloud Drive, or bought from the Amazon MP3 store, home to 17 million songs.

Free Cloud Storage: This is one of the Kindle's most talked about features. Without using memory you can store all Amazon content in the Amazon cloud for quick and free access.

Email: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL -- access your email from anywhere.

Top Apps:

Pulse: Pre-installed new sleek and stylish news aggregation app.

HootSuite: This application brings all your favorite social media outlets to one location. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Google Buzz are all available.

Twitter: You can tweet on an app solely dedicated to twitter that can be downloaded for free.

Evernote: The free note-taking and organizational tool that saves your information, photos and audio in a cloud service can be downloaded in the Amazon app store for free.

Angry Birds: The game of the year only costs 99 cents for the ad-free version and can be downloaded easily to start the well known and loved Angry Bird challenge.

Wi-Fi analyzer: This free app gives you a full report of Wi-Fi signals with the best signal closest to your tablet.

Kindle Fire Technical Features:

Display: 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS (in-plane switching) technology and anti-reflective treatment, 1024 x 600 pixel resolutions at 169 ppi, 16 million colors.

Size: 7.5 x 4.7 x 0.45 (190 mm x 120 mm x 11.4 mm).

On-device Storage: 8GB internal-80 apps plus 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books.

Cloud Storage: Free for all Amazon content.

Battery Life: Up to eight hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off. Battery life will vary based on wireless usage, such as web browsing and downloading content.

Charge Time: Fully charges in approximately 4 hours via included U.S. power adapter. Also supports charging from your computer via USB.

Wi-Fi connectivity: Supports public and private Wi-Fi networks or hotspots that use the 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, or 802.1X standard with support for WEP, WPA and WPA2 security using password authentication; does not support connecting to ad-hoc (or peer-to-peer) Wi-Fi networks.

USB Port: USB 2.0 (micro-B connector)

Audio: 3.5 mm stereo audio jack, top-mounted stereo speakers.