Amazon has officially announced that it started shipping its new Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 tablet, which sports a $379 starting price for the 16GB model.

The Amazon Kindle Fire HDX also comes in higher-capacity 32GB and 64GB versions, which are available for purchase with immediate shipping for $429 ad $479, respectively.

"The 8.9" Fire HDX is startlingly light - at just 13.2 ounces, it's the lightest large-screen tablet. This is combined with a 339 ppi, perfect-color HDX display, 3x the processing power, 2x the memory, 4x the graphics performance, and backed by Fire OS 3.0, with exclusive features like the revolutionary new Mayday button - and all of this is just $379, much less than you'd pay for a comparable tablet," touted Peter Larsen, Amazon Kindle Vice President, in a press release on Thursday, Nov. 7. "This is the best tablet we've ever built, and we can't wait to see what customers think."

The new Kindle Fire HDX in question spots a 8.9-inch touchscreen with a high resolution of 2560 x 1600 and a pixel density of 339 pixels per inch (ppi). Just recently we reported that DisplayMate compared the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 against the new iPad Air and the Nexus 10 and concluded that Amazon's offering boasts the best display.

"Most impressive of all is the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, which has leapfrogged into the best performing tablet display that we ever tested, significantly outperforming the iPad Air in Brightness, Screen Reflectance, and high ambient light contrast, plus a first place finish in the very challenging category of Absolute Color Accuracy," DisplayMate said earlier this week.

Under the hood, the new Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 packs a quad-core processor clocked at 2.2GHz, paired with Adreno 330 graphics and 2GB of RAM. Other specs include an 8-megapixel rear camera, as well as a 720p HD front-facing shooter.

The Wi-Fi-only Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 is available for order now, while the 4G + LTE version is still in the pre-order state. The AT&T and Verizon versions of the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 4G + LTE will be released next month, on Dec. 10.