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The hackers at XDA Developers have been hard at work trying to port Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich onto the Android Kindle Fire. The first success was made in early December when a limited version of ICS was run on the Fire. Last week there was a breakthrough in what the XDA coders are calling a "pre-alpha" of the fire running an actual version of the newest Android OS. See the video below.

The Kindle Fire just hit stores, but rumors from the supply chain indicate that two new models are already in production for next year. DigiTimes says Amazon will launch an 8.9-inch model by the end of Q2 2012 and is also developing a 10.1-inch tablet. Already, 22% of prospective tablet buyers want a Kindle Fire (65% want an iPad). With more choices, Amazon can meet more demand.

Amazon has ordered 5 million units of the current model to meet pre-orders. Will those people have buyers' remorse when they hear about new models? Well, at the $200 price point, at least it won't hurt as much as an iPad. Amazon found the consumer sweet spot with that price, even though they lose $2.70 on each one. In other words, the first shipment of Kindle Fires cost Amazon $13.5 million, and that's if they sell them all. Why would they take that hit and still order two new versions? Because the Kindle Fire is a service, not a product.

Jeff Bezos wasn't just rambling today when he was talking about Amazon's cloud services in the middle of the consumer-focused Kindle triple-launch. Amazon's Kindle has massive implications for the tablet market, but the Silk browser has some implications for the Web at large. And don't expect the Silk browser to stay confined to the Kindle Fire.

By funneling traffic through Amazon's own servers, it may create some privacy implications and security concerns for individuals and businesses. It also changes the landscape a bit for cloud computing providers.

It is interesting to look through all the material that Amazon has released for its announcement of the new Kindle Fire tablet. From the announcement of the new family of Kindles, to the product page on Amazon.com to the press release for the new cloud-based browser Silk, the word Android is not mentioned once.

The Kindle Fire is a tablet, built off Android. Amazon developers forked Android somewhere along the way, probably from either the Frozen Yogurt 2.2 or Gingerbread 2.3.4 so really, this is actually a tablet built off a smartphone OS and not the official Android tablet OS, Honeycomb. Yet, Amazon is about to blow the rest of the Android tablet ecosystem out of the water.

Alongside its Kindle Fire tablet device and new line of Kindle e-readers, Amazon introduced another new product today: Amazon Silk, a mobile Web browser that rethinks the way browsers have traditionally worked.

Silk essentially splits the architecture of the Web browser in half, relying on both the computing power of the hardware and on the remote servers that comprise Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It relies on the cloud to call up certain elements of a page, acting sort of like a content delivery network built right into the browser. The company claims that this unique approach will offer a much faster browser experience to end users.

For the better part of the last year, rumors have been swirling around the possibility of Amazon launching its own tablet computer. For nearly as long, the device has been touted as a potential challenger to Apple's iPad, which remains overwhelmingly dominant in the space.

This morning, Amazon's tablet was finally unveiled. Should Apple be concerned?

Today, the culmination of a summer of speculation and hype comes to an end. Amazon has announced its tablet, the Kindle Fire. It is a 7-inch little beast priced at $199 that will integrate all of Amazon's media properties and retail channels into a device that the company will push hard through the holiday season. With that comes the Amazon Android Appstore and the ability to tap into Amazon's resources to push premium apps to the Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is going to be popular. So, what does this mean for the Amazon Appstore vis-à-vis the Android Market? Can Amazon overcome its ugly recent history with Android developers and create a go-to market to place premium apps? That is the subject of today's ReadWriteMobile poll.

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.