The FIRE HD6 Tablet

 At first, there was a single Kindle Fire tablet. Then Amazon decided they needed a bigger, better tablet at a more premium price point. This time around, they've decided that smaller and cheaper is the way to go. Amazon's just unveiled their Fire tablet line-up, and the new kid on the block is the $99 Fire HD 6.

With a six-inch diagonal, it's not much bigger than many smartphones and it's actually slightly smaller than the Galaxy Mega 6.3 and Sony's Xperia Z Ultra. The HD 6 features a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, 8 or 16GB of internal storage, a resolution of 1280 x 800, front and rear cameras, and a battery that lasts for around 8 hours. It doesn't have the same dual-band Wi-Fi as the larger Fire models, but it's "pocketable," according to Amazon not something the Fire HD 7 or HDX can claim (unless you've got really big pockets).
$99 gets you an 8GB Fire HD 6 with special offers. Dumping Amazon's promotions bumps the price up by another $15 and adding 8GB of storage will cost you $20 more. While it might be small, it's specced out similarly to the Fire HD 7.

At $139, the 7-inch Fire adds an obvious inch to the display, stereo speakers, a few ounces of weight, and not much else. It's also only available in black, while the HD 6 also comes in pink, white, yellow, and blue.

As for the Fire HDX 8.9, it's getting a new processor. This year's models runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 clocked at 2.5 GHz. Amazon says the upgrade yields a 70 % improvement in graphics performance. Interestingly enough, the 805 actually has a slower GPU than the 800 but most know that clock speeds don't necessarily lead to better benchmarks.
Another tweak that Amazon made to the Fire HDX 8.9 is to its audio. It's the first tablet to ship with Dolby Atmos. While the chip might be underutilized in a tablet it's capable of shooting 128 discrete audio feeds to 64 individual speakers you can at least count on your Amazon Prime videos looking and sounding better than they did on the first-gen HDX.

Fire HD_Kids Edition

And for those of you with little ones at home, you may want to check out the Fire HD Kid's Edition. The 6-inch model starts at $149. The extra cash covers a "kid-proof" case and a no-questions-asked, two-year warranty. If your son or daughter chucks it out a second-story window or leaves it behind the rear tire of your car, no worries. Amazon will replace it.
You can't ship new tablets with old software, right? All the new Fire models come with Fire OS 4, which is still a bit of a work in progress. Amazon has added multiple user support, the Fire TV's predictive ASAP feature, and the Fire Phone's Firefly product scanning app. Some features including library sharing and private browsing will arrive in the near future.