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Kindle Fire: Yep, it'll have Netflix, Pandora, and more

Amazon does its best to one-up the new Nook Tablet, rattling off a long list of the high-profile apps that'll be available on the Fire from day one.

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Eric Mack
2 min read
Don't worry kids--the Cat in the Hat and Monkey Preschool Lunchbox are among the apps that will be available for Kindle Fire from day one. Amazon

Amazon wants to reassure consumers that its upcoming Kindle Fire tablet will run big-name apps like Netflix and Pandora.

The company sent out a release this morning dropping the names of the two big streaming-media apps, along with plenty of others that will be available for the Kindle Fire right out of the gate when it becomes available next week.

Barnes & Noble made a big deal out of its brand-new Nook Tablet's compatibility with Netflix and Pandora at its recent unveiling, apparently giving Amazon a bit of a complex.

Amazon did its best to one-up the Nook in today's release, rolling out the laundry list of Fire-friendly apps that will be available on day one, including "Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio."

Although Amazon has talked about having Netflix running on the Kindle Fire since the tablet's unveiling, it's been a little unclear how many of the multitude of apps in the Android Market will be made available through Amazon's own app store, which will be the primary way Kindle Fire users will get their apps.

"We started talking to app developers everywhere the day we introduced Kindle Fire, and the response has been overwhelming," Dave Limp, Amazon's Kindle VP, said in the statement.

Amazon now says "several thousand" Android apps will be available through the Amazon Appstore for Kindle Fire, considerably less than the hundreds of thousands of apps currently populating the Android Market. Of course, this could be a good thing, as much of what's offered there is pure garbage.

The Kindle Fire ships November 15, and Amazon is quick to repeat its elevator speech for the new slate, offering access to "more than 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, apps and games, as well as free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync for books and movies..." and yes, Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope are included in that 18 million.