After making an explosive debut last year, Kindle Fire tablet's sales are cooling down. Amazon needs to launch a successor to the Kindle Fire tablet to hold on its shares in the tablet market. And the digital retailer is reportedly doing just that. Kindle Fire 2 is expected to debut in August with HD display and other improvements.

According to a report by China Times [English translation], Amazon is prepping a successor to Kindle Fire tablet that could debut as early as next month. Moreover, the Chinese newspaper claims that the tablet will go on sales August 7.

The publication hints that Kindle Fire 2 will come in three screen sizes - 7-inch, 8.9-inch and 10-inch. However, the production of 7-inch variant is in quick progress and it will debut first (on August 7).

According to another report, this one by CNET, 7-inch Kindle Fire 2 will debut in Q3, followed by 8.9-inch variant in Q4 2012. However, 10-inch Kindle Fire is unlikely to see the light of day, especially in near future.

Amazon will bring two new Kindle Fires this August - one with 1,024 X 600 pixels display, and another with 1,280 X 800 pixels resolution plus camera, CNET claims. The latter model will also have a variant, packing LTE radios for cellular connectivity, which is scheduled to debut in September.

Amazon will release its fifth entry into Kindle Fire family in the last quarter of 2012. The end-year variant will have 8.9-inch display with a resolution of 1,920 X 1,200 pixels.

Kindle Fire 2 is a significant improvement over the original Kindle Fire. New metal casing replaces the soft plastic backcover found in the original Kindle Fire tablet. Display resolution also bumps up from 1,024 X 600 pixels to 1,280 X 800, which takes it to the same league as Google's Nexus 7 tablet.

According to China Times report, Taiwanese ODM Quanta has been assigned with the task to build the 7-inch Amazon slate. The battery will be built by an unnamed Chinese manufacturer.

Further details about the hardware of Kindle Fire 2 are unknown. The processor chip is likely to be Texas Instruments dual-core OMAP or Nvidia's widely adopted quad-core Tegra 3. We can expect 1GB of RAM, 16GB of build-in storage and access to Android applications.