Today a friend alerted me (thanks Stèphane!) that Amazon has sneaked its 7inch Amazon Kindle Fire tablet into the Canadian store for pre-order.  I have put one on pre-order for your reviewing pleasure.  I may return it as I did the Kobo Aura, but I do want to check it out.

Now those of you who have followed my blog may remember that I said I wouldn’t buy an Amazon tablet.  My main gripe was that the Fire was designed to give access to Amazon’s book and multimedia content, the latter of which was sorely lacking outside the US.  So what has changed since I wrote that post in September 2011?

• Amazon has opened a Canadian specific Kindle store.
• It has launched Amazon Prime in Canada.
• Today it opened the Amazon App Store in Canada

There are other compelling reasons for me to check out the Kindle Fire.  

Absolutely awesome integration with Audible.  I have grown to love audiobooks and Whispersync for Voice which keeps your place between the audiobook and your Kindle ebook.  This is a wonderful feature that I adore.  Currently I read on my Kindle and listen to Audible audiobooks on my iPhone.  This is even more tightly integrated on the Kindle HD.  

X-Ray for Movies and TV. I really love the X-Ray feature on Kindle ebooks which links to Shelfari to provide useful reference information on the book.  This is a godsend when reading big doorstoppers of books.  With the Kindle Fire Amazon has linked with iMDB to provide similar information for movies and TV shows.  At this point though it’s not clear if movies will be available from Amazon for Canadian users.

So in short, I’m looking forward to checking out the Kindle Fire when it comes to Canada next month.

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