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Those people who have been sitting on the fence, trying to make a decision between a new e-reader or a tablet can breathe easy. Amazon.com, the largest online media retailer, has officially announced the new Kindle Fire – an Android based tablet with Kindle e-reader functionality.

Amazon made the announcement on Wednesday, September 28th during an unveil in New York City. Amazon is another contender hoping to grab a piece of the tablet market but experts speculate that this time the gamble just might work. That is mainly because Amazon is going to sell the devices for the low price of $199. Compared to the popular iPad, the new Kindle Fire will be considerably better priced.

The Kindle Fire is a 7” backlit display tablet utilizing the Android operating system. The Fire is a touchscreen only device as there appears to be no physical buttons. The Fire will be amazing at many things including being a wireless media player, internet browser and e-book reader. Amazon will utilize its new Appstore for Android, instead of the traditional Android one.

Amazon has been making plenty of moves lately with announcements such as offering unlimited online video streaming with an annual subscription to Amazon Prime, their free 2-day shipping benefit to subscribers. Also, there was the deal with Fox, which gives Amazon even more content options for streaming customers. Both of these moves will benefit Kindle Fire purchasers.

The new Kindle Fire will also come preloaded with the company’s own browser, Amazon Silk. Insiders are looking forward to the new browser because of the promise Amazon has made that the browser will be able to load tablet webpages significantly faster than other tablets on the market. The way it will work is that the tablet will divide up the work: the device itself will handle smaller tasks and then Amazon will use it’s new cloud computing system, Amazon’s EC2, to handle the harder tasks. This should free up effort on the tablet that will translate into faster page loads.

There are also potential downsides to the new Kindle Fire that should be taken into consideration. The Fire will have no camera or microphone so chatting is out. The device only has 8G of internal storage so users will have to rely on cloud computing and not downloading for their media usage.

Even with those problems, the Kindle Fire is hard to pass up with a $199 price tag. Amazon is going to start selling them November 15th. Buyers will get access to Amazon Prime for free for the first 30 days after purchase.