Amazon Begins Shipping Kindle Fire HDX 8.9-inch Tablet

If you've been jonesing for Amazon's recently announced 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX tablet, we have good new for you today. Amazon has begun shipping out its large screen slate, which up to this point was available as a pre-order item. It's now in stock, and if you didn't reserve one via pre-order prior to today, you can still have one arrive at your doorstep super fast, and without getting gouged on shipping -- it's eligible for Amazon's Prime shipping service.

"The 8.9-inch Fire HDX is startlingly light—at just 13.2 ounces, it’s the lightest large-screen tablet. This is combined with a 339 ppi, perfect-color HDX display, 3x the processing power, 2x the memory, 4x the graphics performance, and backed by Fire OS 3.0, with exclusive features like the revolutionary new Mayday button—and all of this is just $379, much less than you’d pay for a comparable tablet," said Peter Larsen, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "This is the best tablet we’ve ever built, and we can’t wait to see what our customers think."

Kindle Fire HDX

Price isn't the only factor that gives Amazon bragging rights here. Dr. Raymond Soneira at DisplayMate recently proclaimed the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX's display to be the best among all tablets, "significantly out-performing the iPad Air in Brightness, Screen Reflectance, and high ambient light contrast." It also snagged a first place finish in Absolute Color Accuracy, which Dr. Soneira says is a "very challenging category." That's high praise coming from a respected source (we use DisplayMate software in our monitor reviews).

The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX is available in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities with either Wi-Fi only or both Wi-Fi and Cellular connectivity (via AT&T or Verizon). It has a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU with Adreno 330 GPU, 2GB of RAM, USB 2.0 (micro-B connector) support, front-facing 720p camera, 8MP rear-facing camera, and up to 12 hours of mixed-use battery life.