To date, nobody's been able to make a real dent in Apple's near dominance of the tablet market, even though plenty have tried. Apple and Samsung are, with the time of writing, locked in a fairly brutal court battle regarding Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1, but it's an unit that's most most likely going to be priced near identically towards the iPad 2. At that value point, it is a tough sell for the average consumer.Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire, however, takes details in an interesting new direction. It really is a 7" Android Tablet with significantly exactly the same hardware as Blackberry's Playbook, which means that while it really is not absolutely cutting edge in terms of specifications, it's still fairly handy in terms of basic processing. Amazon's made two key decisions with all the Fire that make it stand out in the somewhat bland Android pack.For a start, you won't automatically realise that it is running Android, because unlike every other Android 3 ("Honeycomb") tablet, the Fire isn't running Honeycomb at all. Instead, it is based off the older smartphone 2.1 edition of Android, but completely reskinned such that it doesn't search like anybody else's Android at all. Amazon's including tight integration with its on the web ventures including books, video and app stores, which sadly means that when the Fire launches in mid-November, it'll be US-only for now. Owning said that, Amazon's only just launched the Kindle into the local Australian market at a retail level; the model that's now known because the "Kindle Keyboard" is being sold on retailer shelves in Woolworths, Dick Smith and Big W, so there's hope that we'll see the Fire locally sooner instead of later. The real hook using the Fire isn't the specifications or the integration with Amazon's internet services, even though they're a great point of differentiation in their own ideal. Instead, it is the asking selling price, which can be $US199. The Australian dollar has only just slipped under parity with all the US dollar, and there's always GST to tack on to any purchase, so that could very well develop into, say, $250 by the time it does hit our stores. Still, $250 for a tablet with these specifications is an absolute steal. The closest we've come to that kind of pricing on a brand-name tablet to date has been HP's TouchPad, but that was a case from the company selling off the remaining stock in a (pun not intended) fire sale. The Fire's very low entry price tag makes it a compelling option for content consumption, that's still the single best reason to buy a tablet of any stripe, and if Amazon can get it to Aussie consumers sooner as opposed to later it could nicely possess a real iPad competitor on its hands.