New Amazon Kindle Fire tablets could see bump in display resolution

With the exception of the $159 Kindle Fire and its 1024 x 600 display, the tablets in Amazon’s lineup have been on-par with offerings from other tablet makers. Still, according to sources for BGR, the company plans to upgrade displays in Kindle Fire tablets at three different price points, apparently not content with equaling competing tablets but instead trying to best them in that category.

The first-ever Kindle Fire that launched back in 2011 featured the same 1024 x 600 display you’ll find on today’s $159 7-inch model. If we’re to believe the BGR report, the display on this Kindle Fire tablet will be brought up to 1200 x 800. This is the current resolution of the $199 Kindle Fire HD as well as Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, which sells for the same price. We don’t know what the next-generation Nexus 7 looks like yet, but if the new Kindle Fire came out tomorrow, it would at least offer the same display resolution at a price $40 less than the current Nexus 7.

The 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, which, at $199, essentially competes head to head with the Nexus 7, would get bumped up to 1,920 x 1,200. On a tablet that’s only 7-inches diagonally, that makes for a pretty impressive pixels-per-inch (PPI) count of 323. That’s well within the “Retina” range for tablets and actually comes pretty close — just 3 PPI short — of matching the iPhone 5.

(Note: The 7-inch Kindle Fire HD is actually selling for $169, “For a limited time.” Clearing out stock?)

Last but not least, we have the $269 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet, which was Amazon’s first crack at a larger, high-resolution tablet to compete directly with the iPad. This tablet would see its resolution raised from 1,920 x 1,200 to a whopping 2,560 x 1,600. That easily dwarfs the iPad with Retina’s resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 and does so on a screen that’s nearly an inch smaller. In fact, you’d have to go to a larger Apple product — the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina — to find a display that equals the one we could see in the revamped 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD.

There are some other rumored changes to the Kindle Fire line of tablets — a different outer casing, for starters, as well as different button placements. But as of now, there isn’t a whole lot of other news on Amazon’s next generation of Kindle Fire tablets. The bumps in screen resolution are a pretty big deal, though, especially when Amazon’s devices are battling competitors with larger app ecosystems and more brand cachet. Will the company have anything else up its sleeve for its upgraded tablet line? We’ll find out soon enough.