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NEW YORK — The Kindle was always an odd product name. Amazon used a verb to name a thing, raising the question: Kindle what? Now we have the answer: Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is the first full-color, touch-screen Kindle. It’s available in the U.S. $199. A price like that for what’s essentially a small iPad is bound to light the flames of desire this holiday season.

The Fire is the best Kindle yet, no doubt about it. It’s amazing that it costs half of what the first Kindle cost just four years ago, yet does so much more than display books.

It’s more of an all-purpose computer than an e-reader. It shows movies, TV shows and Web pages. It does email and lets you play games. You’ll be lucky to get any reading done with so many other things to do.

But it has to be weighed against the competition. When you do that, it becomes apparent just how spare Amazon had to keep the device to limbo under that $200 price level.

The Kindle’s design is even starker than the iPad’s. It’s a black monolith with only one button — the power switch — and two jacks, for headphones and power. All the controls are on the screen. The screen measures 7 inches diagonally, a bit larger than the monochrome Kindles and a bit less than half the size of the iPad’s. The smaller size does make the Fire more portable than an iPad.

The size of the screen wasn’t much of an issue on the monochrome Kindles because they were mainly good for showing text anyway. But the responsive color screen of the Fire opens up a lot of possibilities, such as showing magazine and comic book pages.

While we’re on the subject of “too small,” let’s talk about the Fire’s memory. It has 8 gigabytes of storage. That’s enough for more books than you’ll ever read, but 10 movies will eat up the whole thing.

The cheapest iPad, which costs $499, has twice as much memory. The Nook Color, which costs $199, also has 8 gigabytes, but it comes with a slot for memory expansion with cheap cards. I don’t understand why the Fire doesn’t have a slot like that. The very first Kindle did. There’s no step-up model of the Fire with more memory.

Amazon says the Fire doesn’t need more memory because the company provides an online storage locker, where you can stuff all your music and other content. That works when you have Wi-Fi coverage, but not otherwise — the Fire doesn’t have the ability to use cellular networks, as some of the monochrome models do.

The Fire also lacks a camera and a microphone. Those aren’t things you’d expect in an e-reader (the Nook also lacks them). But they are standard features on tablets and are quite useful, particularly for videoconferencing. Their absence is forgivable at $199.

The Fire’s software is based on Google Inc.’s Android software used in smartphones and a bevy of tablets that compete with the iPad. None has really caught on, except to some extent the Nook Color.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says this is because the other tablets lack an ecosystem of the kind Apple provides in iTunes: an integrated market for books, movies, music and applications.

You can’t buy copy-protected books from anyone but Amazon and expect to read them on the Fire, as you can on the iPad. Even the Nooks allow third-party books.

Amazon achieves this control by operating its own app store, separate from the Android Market run by Google. Clever people will figure out a way to bypass this and install any app they want, but most people won’t want to bother.

The Fire does justice to fiction and movies, but the iPad does better in almost every way, particularly in the selection of apps, which is about 50 times greater than the Fire’s.

If the step up to $499 is too much, you might want to consider the Nook Tablet, which comes out Friday. At $249, it will be the same size as the Fire, but with twice the memory, plus a memory expansion slot. It won’t access all of Amazon’s goodies and apps, but it will have Netflix and Hulu. Take a look at it before jumping to the Fire. TAS