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Amazon just announced the Kindle Fire. It's a Wi-Fi only, 7-inch tablet with a full-color, backlit, 1024x600 IPS touchscreen (video). It has a dual-core processor, and it weighs 14.6 ounces. It looks like a BlackBerry PlayBook. The resemblance is not an accident; as Ryan Block at gdgt reported on Monday, the same original design manufacturer (ODM) - Quanta Computer of Taiwan - made both, and Amazon's Kindle team used the PlayBook's hardware as a template.

But the similarities end there. The software is a custom fork of Android that has Amazon's own feel, and it puts Amazon's vast catalogues of digital content at users' fingertips. In addition to the Kindle reader app, it offers Amazon's Cloud Player for music, and Instant Video Player for TV and movies. It comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, and it ships with Amazon's own Android Appstore, rather than Google's. With Android as the starting point, Amazon has built its own tablet experience on top of it. At $199, the Fire is now the top of the Kindle line. It ships November 15.

Amazon has declared its Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) production ready. With the update, Amazon is introducing a security center to track security and privacy issues, providing 50 new packages for the distribution and adding access to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).

The Linux AMI provides a Linux image for use on Amazon EC2, so that users have a way to get started with EC2 without having to create their own image or use one of the paid images from Red Hat or SUSE.

Amazon.com added FOX movie and TV titles through its Prime Membership platform today in a deal that will roughly double the number of available titles to 11,000 by this Fall.

The announcement comes two days before Amazon is expected to launch one of two Kindle tablets to compete with the iPad.

Amazon issued a press release moments ago that may put to rest rumors of a tablet thought to be forthcoming from the e-retailing giant.

The company is holding an invite-only event in New York on September 28 but they are not saying what the event is about.

Amazon threw down the gauntlet against terrestrial competitors today by announcing that Kindle and Kindle app customers can borrow and purchase Kindle books from more than 11,000 local libraries in the United States.

In essence, these first 11,000 local libraries just became a chain of local bookstores for Amazon's catalog of virtual books.

California lawmakers may give Amazon.com a one-year reprieve in their contentious battle over state taxes, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Amazon has been fighting a new law that demanded Internet retailers collect state taxes starting this past July if they had offices, workers or other connections in California. Lawmakers hoped the tax would earn the economically depressed state $200 million annually. Amazon fought the law viciously, pulling out of the state and leaving 25,000 affiliates without the online platform that extended their sales reach.

Third-party application store GetJar has released a "gold" service that will enable users to download premium Android applications for free. GetJar Gold is designed to give consumers access to apps they would otherwise have to pay for while increasing visibility for developers that may be seeing sluggish sales in the Android Market.

GetJar Gold is akin to what Amazon is doing with its Android application store. The Amazon Appstore features a premium Android app a day and is supposed to share the revenue made from downloads with developers. This has been a controversial program for Amazon and its relationship with developers has suffered. Can GetJar's pay-per-download model pull it off?

Last Friday, Amazon took on the U.S. Post Office and opened a real world locker box service as a delivery portal for the stuff people buy on Amazon.com.

The lockers, which come in several sizes, are located on a wall in a 7-11 convenience store in Seattle surrounding an ATM-like device that allows a customer to key in a PIN and pick up their Amazon package.

These days, the tablet computer seems to be central to much of Amazon's product strategy. The company is working on a substantial redesign of its website, which aims to simplify the browsing experience for users on iPads and other tablets.

The new design cleans up the site's UI significantly, hiding the store department buttons on the left in favor of a tidy drop-down menu and doing away with many of the graphics and other UI elements that have become so familiar to Amazon shoppers. The result is a simpler layout with a bigger search box and much more whitespace.

Amazon nudged the experience of reading books ever-so-slightly further into the future today. The company announced a new feature for its Kindle reading platform that lets readers ask authors questions about their books as they're reading.

The new program, called @author, lets Kindle users highlight a passage and then ask the author a question about it via their Amazon author page or Twitter. Only questions as long as 100 characters can be asked from within the e-book itself, but more in-depth curiosities can be posted to the author's official page on Amazon.