Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet announcement - live

The online retailer Amazon is unveiling details of its new tablet computer, expected to be called the Kindle Fire, at a briefing in New York. Follow live updates

10.21am ET / 3.21pm BST: Bezos is reading Remains of The Day to us. I feel a bit sleepy.

10.19am ET / 3.19pm BST: It's the Kindle Touch. It's a very stripped down looking e-reader. Now I see why he was managing expectations. It fits in the palm of his skinny hand just. It looks like a Kindle, and has a touch screen. It's black and white.

I'm wondering if Bezos is about to do a Steve Jobs and pull out something a bit fancier in a minute.

10.15am ET / 3.15pm BST: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is showing slides of all the negative comments that Kindle received. The sales charts show otherwise, he says. "Four years ago we stated with 90,000 books today it's a million," he says. "You can choose any of these books and have them in 60 seconds wirelessly."

This all looks like a pitch for how the new device will get better over time, to defuse criticism that it's an underpowered iPad.

10.12am ET / 3.12pm BST: According to Bloomberg, the Kindle Fire will have a seven-inch display half the size of the iPad. Priced at $199, it's half the price of the cheapest iPad, which retails at $499, and will run on Google's Android operating system.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon shares rose $8.59, or 3.8 percent, to $232.80 at 9:47am on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Apple rose $3.46 to $402.72

10.06am ET / 3.06pm BST: Bloomberg is reporting that the Kindle Fire will cost $199. I guess we are just about to find out.

10.04am / 3.04pm BST: We are sitting in Stage 37 a warehouse on the west end of 37th Street in Manhattan. It's a capacity crowd. And we are off. "New York City Two years Ago" reads the fi! rst slid e, introducing an ad about the Kindle.

9.59am ET / 2.59pm BST: The press are filing in. Sadly I think there are too many of us for everyone to get a freebie. Here's some pre-match comment from professor Ajay Bhalla from Cass Business School. He doesn't think it will rival the iPad. "At this stage, it is incorrect to assume that Amazon tablet will be a true rival to Apple iPad." He says Apple's ecosystem is hard to imitate for rivals. Transferring their stuff between Apple devices is seamless.

Apple has moved fast to replicate the same user experience across Mac and iOS devices. Can Amazon do what Apple has done? Has it got the focus Apple has?

9.45am / 2.45pm BST: I'm in a distant corner of western Manhattan waiting for Amazon to unveil something.

Taking a leaf (or pip perhaps) from the Apple playbook, the company has sent an invite saying that we all expect to be the unveiling of a new tablet device called Kindle Fire.

There are hundreds of journalists here. Not since Moses descended from Mount Sinai has a tablet been so hotly anticipated. Well, maybe not. Apple's iPad is way more significant than the ten commandments.

Apple now has 70% of the tablet market. So Amazon has a lot to prove. While I wait in line to get in, here's the preview I wrote yesterday.


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