The Amazon Kindle Fire 2 shall be known as the Amazon Kindle 2012. That’s from the horse’s mouth, as Amazon let rip with its latest creations at the company’s Santa Monica press conference, announcing a new upgrade to the previous model that sold out of last week, alongside a new powerful, bigger Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

The stripped down, walled-up Android entertainment tablet comes with 1GB or RAM - twice that of the 2011 model - a brand new processor and with a performance Amazon claims is 44 per cent better than before.

At just $159 when it arrives on 14 September, the Kindle Fire 2012 comes in at 40 bucks less than the already rock-botton Google Nexus 7 tablet and looks set for a good old dust up when it hits the market proper.

It will come with a number of software enhancements too, including a slightly changed interface with some new tricks, the most exciting of which for parents is Kindle FreeTime. The feature lets you set different time limits for different kinds of content for your kids. Books? Unlimited. Games and TV? Limited.

Other software features include X-Ray for Movies, Immersion Reading, and Whispersync for Games - a service that, like Apple iCloud syncing, would allow games developers to store game progress in the cloud. 

X-Ray for Movies, just like X-Ray for books is a feature that uses the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to name the actors for you while you are watching the movies. 

UK prices and timings to come, if indeed it launches outside the USA. Fingers crossed.