While Amazon's new Kindle Fire has been compared to the iPad, its true competitor is Barnes and Noble's Nook Color. The Kindle Fire is an e-reader on steroids but not a competitor to the iPad and Galaxy in terms of computing power, memory and features.

Barnes and Noble is rumored to be planning a successor to its Nook Color. Can it outdo the competitor given the Kindle's price of $199 for an Android device? And that is not all the Nook has to beat.

Both the Nook Color and Kindle Fire are 7-inch tablet devices with Wi-Fi connection and eight hours of battery life. But that is where the similarities end.

Kindle Fire uses Android 2.3 Gingerbread, while Nook Color runs on Froyo 2.2. This enables the Kindle Fire to use more apps in the Android Market than the Nook.

While both have a customized browser, the Kindle Fire is up against Amazon Silk, which speeds up loading times by having the Web site it visits first be "assembled" in Amazon's server. Instead of getting data from multiple servers with different loading times depending on location, it transmits the site to Amazon's server and then transfers it to the browser.

Barnes and Nobles has millions of books available for reading as e-books. Amazon does too, from its years of being an e-commerce company and then some. Not only does Amazon have e-books ready for download, it also has music and video services for cloud computing. Bundled with the device is access to unlimited storage in Amazon's cloud servers and a 30-day trial of Amazon Prime, the $79-a-year service for free two-day deliveries and instant streaming of movies and television shows. This is where its device lives up to its name. The Kindle has become a fire while the Nook is in the corner ropes.

While 8 gigs is sufficient for what is necessarily a cloud device powered by Android, Nook Color has expandable memory in case you want to go offline and still have access to your books and music. Still, Barnes and Noble have to step up with a new Nook device if it wants to compete with the Kindle in the e-reader market.

While the Kindle Fire is not a competitor to the two main tablets now, the iPad and Samsung Galaxy, both Samsung and Apple should beware. The Kindle can and will chip some market share as the Kindle Fire performs most functions that offer as multimedia devices.

Amazon's Kindle Fire will be available in Nov. 5 in the U.S. only, and pre-orders are avaiable at Amazon's site. No Australian release date has been announced.