Kindle Fire Review
Amazon has entered the tablet arena spoiling for a fight with the heavyweight. With decent specs, a nice 7” screen, and a price less than half that of its chief competitor, can it compete? After playing with one for a month I have come to the conclusion that yes, indeed it can.
Form
The Kindle Fire’s styling is about as minimalist as you can go. The device features a black soft-touch rubberized back with an etched Kindle logo, while the front is highly reflective and a slightly darker shade of black. There is a thin band of rubber around the edge of the face, probably there to keep the glass from scraping across rough surfaces. The bottom has a power button that glows green on a full charge and orange one that’s not, a 3.5 mm speaker jack and a micro-usb port. That’s it. The only button on the device is the power button. You could almost describe this thing as the antithesis to Apple’s products, a lack of design to designing for cleanliness.
But the styling works. It won’t be hideous in your hand, and that rubberized back gives it good handfeel.
The thickness is a little greater than I would have liked. At .45”, it is hardly thick, and in fact is only a tenth of an inch off of the thickness of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, but at this screen size that thickness is much more noticeable.
The Kindle Fire also feels heavy. Its still less than a pound, but the thing has heft. Fortunately, that heft doesn’t interfere with your ability to hold the tablet one handed, a trick I dare you to try with an iPad out of a case. While I might be biased, since I’ve always found 10” tablets too big, but I find that the size of this device is just about right. Now if they could just do something about the gigantic bezel...
The battery routinely lasts me through a day of moderate to heavy use. I stress mine a little more than most people would, thanks to me going beyond the stock experience, but I still eek out probably 6 hours of active runtime, easily. It doesn’t seem like watching a movie trashes the battery life too much, either, which is a good thing. Keep in mind, though, that with only 8 gigs onboard storage, you will probably need to stream your movies over wifi. That leaves you in a bit of a pinch if you’re on a flight, as most still don’t have internet onboard.
The screen is a decent quality IPS display at 1280 x 600. The colors are bright and crisp, and the screen can put out a decent amount of light. Be warned, however, that the glass covering is extremely reflective. Take this thing out with you on a beach and you’ll struggle to make out the text from the burning of your eyes. Seriously, you could use this thing as a mirror. I have.
One final note about the screen. While I find the touch sensitivity fine, the device has a tendancy to assume you are flicking the screen up. I read on a forum that the device might be sampling in one too many upward touches, so you can accidentally send it scrolling down a list. I don’t know, but it can get annoying.
Software
Let’s talk about the interface first. Unlike a traditional Android tablet, there is no normal home screen. You don’t get widgets or wallpapers. Rather, you have a dock with an interesting coverflow mechanic that hosts your most recently used apps and a list of pinned favorite apps below. The top coverflow thing shows everything you’ve accessed, whether it be movies, web pages, apps, or music.
It all goes there on a nice, long scrollable list. In the original draft of the software there was no way remove... sensitive things from the coverflow list, so you needed to be careful. As of the most recent software revision, however, you can delete things from the list. the favorites list below is just a simple panel that you can scroll through. Everything is set on faux wooden shelves, ala iBooks crossed with the standard Android app drawer. Its nice, but not overly original.
Along the top of the screen are tabs that let you access the various Amazon services. Video, music, books, apps and the web all have their own tab up there. Each has its own list of media whether it be music or videos. Book, magazines apps have the faux wooden shelves of the favorites, while videos and music get their own styling. In the upper right of each corner of the media sources is a store button, letting you spend all that money you saved not buying an iPad.
Since there are no buttons, Amazon has implemented its own soft buttons. Android has had soft button support since Android version 3 Honeycomb, but Amazon decided to base their device on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. When you are in an app, there will be a small grey drawer at the bottom with an upward facing arrow. Tap that and you get a home, menu, back and search button. It’s a clean enough implementation of a soft menu system, but I can’t help but feel that there could be a better implementation.
The interface is nice enough, I suppose, but it is hardly breaking new UI ground. Overall the device just feels a bit boring. Oh, and that coverflow mechanic? It can be hard to get it to be still.
Really the only issue I have is with the keyboard, which admittedly isn’t fully their fault. The keyboard they have included is a skinned version of the native Honeycomb one, which is fairly terrible. The word prediction is terrible, the autocorrect rarely kicks in, you frequently tap the wrong letter when typing, and the spacing just feels wrong. The space bar is just too tiny for the space.
Every time I tried to write an article of any length on the device (a feat I can accomplish with ease on an iPad) Ifind thatmy sentences look likethis. The only reason I lay blame on Amazon for this, however, is because they disabled the ability to swap keyboards. Unlike any stock Android device, which lets you just use another keyboard if you don’t like the one that came with the device, you are disallowed from using another keyboard. Seriously, they went out of their way to make it impossible. They don’t even show the keyboards you already own in the Amazon market. That bothers me to no end, as an avid Swype and SwiftKey user.
Ecosystem
The key differentiator between this device and a normal Android tablet is that this device relies on Amazon services. And, good news, they work well.The Kindle performance is stellar, as you would expect from a Kindle. Keep in mind, though, that this is still an Android build of the Kindle app. You won’t have text to speech like you would with a normal Kindle.
The video library is quite good, and the device makes it very easy to download and watch a movie with the click of a button. It makes Amazon’s streaming TV and movie selection feel like it is actually supposed to be used, something that the web-based versions lack. Buying music is similarly simple, and the selection is good, but then let’s face it: if you’r not buying through iTunes, you’re buying through Amazon. That isn’t anything new. Amazon has also (thoughtfully) included a superb Amazon shopping app. It really is the best shopping experience available on a tablet. Everything is easily shopped for, and everything is simple to view and buy. If anything, I would argue that the Kindle Fire makes shopping too easy. It feels a bit like you already own everything, you’re just confirming that you do. Don’t let your kids get a hold of this thing, or you might end up with some incredible credit card bills.
Amazon’s App Store has been out for a while now, offering apps to more traditional Android devices. And while there is a fair selection of apps on it, it pales in comparison to the Android market’s tally. Most of the apps are also made for phones, so they end up looking a bit ugly on the screen. A few apps truly do take advantage of the larger screen, but you’ll have to look long and hard to find them. You also won’t fine many productivity apps on here. The Amazon market is heavily skewed towards games and gimmicks. Amazon does offer a free app each day, however, so there’s that.
In Short...
The Kindle Fire is a good, if limited device. This is not an iPad, and it doesn’t want to be one. Amazon can get away with the insane $200.00 pricepoint by tying you into its services. It knows that, to use your device, you must buy things through what the company has integrated. That leaves you to make a few trade-offs. If you can’t live with them, well, this device isn’t for you. You can get a full-fledged Android tablet for $400, roughly twice the price. But for watching movies and reading books, you can’t get much better than this.Photo by : Courtney Boyd Myers
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