The Amazon Kindle Fire is what the tech world likes to coin a game-changer. A gadget with the potential to irrevocably alter a sector of the market to the point of no return.
A fully-fledged Android tablet with a top-level ecosystem of multimedia content for less than half the price of its competitors isn't just changing the game, it's changing the entire sport.
The long-awaited, 7-inch, Android 2.3 Gingerbread tablet, which Amazon has been diligently plotting for the last couple of years off the back of its Kindle e-reader successes, also arrives at the perfect time with the tablet arena at a crossroads.
Despite a flood of Android Honeycomb tablets arriving throughout 2011 offering stiff critical competition to the iPad, nothing has really stuck with consumers who still, by-and-large, see Android tablets as poor-man's iPads for the rich-man's spending power.
£400+ for an undeniably luxury item is just too expensive for some, but the stunning demand for the largely mundane HP TouchPad fire sale proved people do really want affordable tablets.
Now, once Amazon decides to launch in the UK (at present there's no launch date or price in the works) everyone can own a tablet with real pedigree, minus the buyers remorse. It costs just $199 in the US, which works out to about £125.
From Amazon's point of view, the idea is simple. It believes it can replicate the success of its all-conquering Kindle reader devices by once again taking a hit on the hardware.
The built-in ecosystem of books, magazines, apps and movies Amazon has built allows it to do what LG, Samsung, Motorola can't, and what Apple has no reason to; abandon any thought of profitable hardware.
This is the first Kindle to boast a colour screen, a holy grail to some users of the device, and with a 7-inch, 1024x600 display it falls at the smaller end of the tablet sphere.
With Android 2.3 (not the newer tablet-centric Honeycomb 3.0 software) on board, it's also the the first to run anything other than the non-native software. However, Amazon's custom designed user interface takes precedence.
Since Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, and its price point, excitement has been at fever pitch, but it remained a gadget none of us had ever seen up-close or played with.
What would be the use of a $200 Android tablet that doesn't work, has a terrible touchscreen or buggy, unusable software? We flew over a device on launch day in the US, so it's time for the hype to subside and for the testing to begin.
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