Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 launches in Europe and Japan, US version now $269

Good news for those located outside the US. Amazon's Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is now available in a select number of countries in Europe, including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, as well as Japan. To celebrate the expansion, Amazon also dropped the price of the tablet to $269 in the US, with the 4G version now starting at $399.

Previously, the 8.9-inch version of the Kindle Fire HD was priced at $299, while the 4G version costed $499, which means that the WiFi-only model received a $30 price drop, while the 4G LTE model received a healthy $100 drop, making it even more tempting to jump with both feet in and grab the tablet at a good price.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 features a nice 1920x1200-resolution display, which provides 254 ppi of pixel density. The tablet comes with a Texas Instruments OMAP4470 dual-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz with 1GB of RAM. The WiFi-only version comes in 16GB and 32GB flavors, while the 4G model comes in 32GB and 64GB variants.

The Kindle Fire series of tablets are great companions if you're particularly close with Amazon's ecosystem. Prime members get a lot of exclusive features with the Kindle Fire software, including the ability to rent ebooks for free using Amazon's lending library, something that normal Prime members can't take advantage of.