Amazon Kindle Fire HDX Includes Business-Friendly Features

Amazon‘s new 7-inch and 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX Android tablets feature a new version of the Fire operating system, which includes office-friendly features, as well as a higher resolution display and more raw power.

Fire OS 3.0, codenamed Mojito, is a version of Android Jelly Bean, and Amazon claims to have increased its manageability for business use, alongside the addition of more useful features on the tablet, including a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of memory.

Not just for couch potatoes

At its launch, the Kindle Fire low-cost tablet was not seen as enterprise grade, because of missing features, and its operating system – a version of Android which is focused on delivering Amazon content (and encouraging spending at Amazon).

To help get onto enterprise networks, the table supports WPA-2 Wi-Fi passwords, and it also hooks onto secure VPNs, as well as allowing remote device management. both Gmail and Microsoft Exchange email are fully integrated.

There are two versions, 7-inch and 8.9-inch, with resolutions of 323 and 339 pixels per inch respectively. The 8.9-inch version is three times as fast, and about 34 percent lighter than the previous version (374g). The 8.9-inch version has front and rear-facing cameras  – 8MP resolution for the rear-facing one – while the 7-inch version has only a front-facing camera, designed for Skype calls.

The Mayday button could be useful at home and in the office: it sets up an instant video link to Amazon support staff who can take over the system to help with tricky tasks like setting up printers. Amazon assures customers that this won’t infringe their privacy: “Mayday doesn’t know who you are”.  There is also free unlimited cloud storage for Amazon content.

They will ship first in the US on 7 November, at $229 (£143) for the 8.9-inch version. A version with 4G connectivity will also appear on 10 December for $479 (£299).

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