Indian consumers just love discounts. We have witnessed this over and over again. Be it the strategy adopted by apparel brands like Koutons and Cotton County, wherein a packed store had once become a common sight for them, or your local electronics dealer shedding off a few extra bucks on the next mobile handset or air-conditioner you were looking for.

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Had the Kindle Fire not been for $199, it may have been facing a lot of criticism right now – after all it lacks quite some features that as a user I would have expected it to come with. It has no camera, no microphone, and the biggest shortcoming – no 3G capabilities. But at the price-point Amazon has offered it for, it is still a pumped up tablet high on steroids and that too at $300 less a price as the cheapest iPad2. It is the package that will make a difference – as evident from the numbers just discovered. The Kindle Fire has been pre-ordered at an average rate of 50,000 per day; taking the number of pre-orders up to quarter-million in the last five days.

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I've said this before, and I'll say this again - Amazon is on Fire! But I never realized that they literally were riding 'on Fire'. The world's largest online retailer unveiled its much talked about under-$200 tablet earlier this week - Kindle Fire. A device that has a screen size small enough (7-inch display) for it to fit comfortably in your hands, and at a price tag less than half of Apple's cheapest iPad ($499), it is clear that Amazon has Apple in Fire's crosshairs.

Fire is more or less a bumped up version of the Kindle e-book reader, packed with features and runs on Android. The way I see it, Amazon will be able to leverage its dominance in the e-commerce space to ramp up the sale of Fire, and give a real challenge to the iPad with its attractive price tag, and feature-rich product.

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The world's largest online marketplace - Amazon - is all set to launch a new android based 7" tablet, which is expected to spice up things in the tablet market extensively - much owing to its low $250 price tag (expected). And now the details of Amazon revamping its whole web-portal to improve user experience while using Amazon on your tablet lays all the more stress on how much aggressively Amazon is planning to market the new tablet.

With the new tablet expected to be released in the next few weeks, Amazon started testing a major redesign of the website late last week, an overhaul that is expected to make the Amazon site easier to use and navigate on tablets.

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