Amazon Unveils $299 Kindle Fire HD, $499 with 4G LTE

Amazon AMZN has unveiled a new version and a new price of the seven-inch Kindle Fire along with a high-end tablet designed to compete head-on with Apple's AAPL iPad. In fact, the company unveiled four Kindle Fire devices, confirming the implausible-sounding rumor that claimed Amazon was building multiple tablets. The standard, seven-inch Kindle Fire has been upgraded with a faster processor, double the RAM, longer battery life, and a snazzy new price -- $159.99. The $199 price tag remains in place for the seven-inch Kindle Fire HD, while the all-new 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD will retail for $299. The latter device comes packaged with a 1920x1200, 254ppi display, a front-facing camera for making Skype video calls (among other things), and an OMAP 4470 processor from Texas Instruments TXN that reportedly outperforms NVIDIA's NVDA Tegra 3 processor. Amazon did not stop there. Though the company failed to announce the reportedly confirmed Kindle Fire smartphone, the online retail giant went the extra mile and unveiled a $499 tablet that supports 4G LTE. Better still, Amazon is launching a new service that will provide users with 250MB of data (per month), 20GB of cloud storage, and a $10 Amazon Appstore Credit for $49.99 per year. Last but not least, Amazon unveiled the long-awaited Kindle Paperwhite, the first e-reader to feature the so-called "paperwhite display." In short, the company said that it had to build this display from the ground up to provide a clearer, sharper, and more enjoyable reading experience with 25 percent more contrast and 62 percent more pixels. This new Kindle comes in two varieties -- 3G ($179) and Wi-Fi ($119). Follow me @LouisBedigianBZ