Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few days, you are by now well-versed in the specs and capabilities of Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet computer. Seven-inch color touchscreen, Android operating system, WiFi sync capability, cloud storage (for Amazon content only), and best of all, the price tag: just $199. My first reaction was “gotta have it” – I bet you felt the same.

Now that the euphoria has worn off a bit, I'm less excited about the Amazon's new tablet. The seven-inch screen isn't ideal – it's too small for viewing television shows and movies. Amazon's engineers are unlikely to match the quality of the existing Kindles' E-Ink on a color screen, so it's not a perfect e-book reader. The Fire lacks both camera and microphone. As a general-purpose tablet computer, the Fire fizzles in comparison with Apple's iPad – no matter what the price. The hardware simply doesn't compare.

(Rumors have it that Amazon will ship a 10-inch or 12-inch version of the Fire early in 2012. That tablet could be a game-changer. But who knows what Apple will be shipping by then?)

As a tablet, the Fire turns out to be not that interesting. As a media viewer and e-reader, it still has appeal. Especially at the price. I think Amazon will sell a bunch of them.

But the real story in the Fire announcement wasn't the hardware, but the integrated Web browser, named Silk. The browser takes advantage of Amazon's cloud infrastructure to make Web-page decoding and rendering more efficient. On a case-by-case basis, Silk and Amazon's servers will make a decision about which portions of the Web page you are loading will execute in the cloud and which will be rendered on your Fire tablet. The result, Amazon says, is that pages will load and render much more quickly. Silk even predicts which links you are likely to follow, upon loading a page, and has the servers load up the pages before you click. Amazon puts it this way:

With Amazon Silk, most of the heavy-lifting is shifted from the processor on your device to our powerful AWS servers. Access to such lightning fast CPUs, expansive memory, and huge network connections allows the performance of Amazon Silk to transcend the capabilities of your local device. Amazon Silk isn’t just about massive computing power, however. Because much of the intelligence of the browser is in the cloud, a number of performance enhancements become possible, including squeezing the utmost throughput out of your “last mile” connection, smart caching both on your device and on our servers, and on-the-fly content optimizations. In addition, Amazon Silk has the ability to learn about traffic patterns on individual sites over time, allowing it to begin fetching the next page that users may wish to visit.

(I've read that Opera does something similar, but this capability hasn't made the browser a household word. Of course, the good folks behind Opera lack Amazon's cloud servers. And its marketing department. So there you are.)

Silk sounds like a perfect blend between consumer hardware and cloud services. It appears that so far Amazon is undecided about whether it will roll out the browser for Mac, PCs, and smartphones. But if the technology lives up to its promise, then we will all be using something like it sooner or later.

Privacy pundits are up-in-arms over this feature, by the way. (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has posted the clearest account of the security concerns.) Amazon's cloud – Amazon Web Services – will have a record of everything you do on the Web with your Kindle Fire. It's all spelled out in the Amazon Silk Terms and Conditions.

Amazon has achieved its success in large part because it tracks browsing activities on its site and serves up you-might-also-be-interested-in content. Think what the company will do when it knows every site you visit!

For what it's worth, Amazon says Silk's acceleration feature can be disabled. So if privacy is your concern, you can trade off some performance and conceal your browsing activities.

The Kindle Fire will ship November 15. Reserve yours here.

Web recommendation: Ever wonder what route Web data takes on its way to you? You may be surprised to learn that only about 1% of Internet traffic is routed by satellite. Most spans the world over cables strung across the bottom of the oceans. Check out an interactive map here: Submarine Cable Map. It's fascinating. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.