Amazon Kindle Fire Review

This is the first of hopefully many reviews I will write in the near future. Am I going to claim I have an unbiased review? Not at all. I want to bias myself as a discerning customer. I want to make sure that what I recommend is something I would purchase myself. First off, let me start by saying that the Amazon Kindle Fire is a bit late in arriving to the tablet party. However, with Apple being the only true success in tablets, there is still plenty of room to grow. Unfortunately many of the Android based tablets have all had significant drawbacks that prevented them from competing directly with the mighty iPad. The Kindle Fire is a move to carve a new market segment entirely.

The Kindle Fire was born out of the need to unite all of the Amazon services in one device. Just as the iPhone united a phone, an iPod, and an internet communication device; the Kindle Fire unites the Amazon store, Kindle library, Amazon Appstore, and Amazon Cloud Storage. Amazon is truly committed to the cloud, and that is the basis of success upon which the Kindle Fire is built. Physically, the Kindle Fire is an understated but attractive device. No markings clutter its front face, and the rear simply has "Kindle" carved in the back face with an Amazon logo and FCC markings at the bottom. It feels sturdy and does not flex when grabbed in any direction.

The carousel may offend some,
but operation is straightforward

Operation is straightforward and smooth. Although the UI is not as configurable as many would prefer, I think that also contributes to the ultimate goal of the Kindle Fire: provide an inexpensive, user friendly means of interacting with Amazon services and fulfilling the core duties of a tablet. Oh, did I mention it only costs $200? The lack of hardware buttons requires that all navigation is done using the software buttons for Home, Back, and Menu. However, this is well integrated and allows the buttons to auto-hide when not needed. Operation is smooth, and surprisingly fast for a device with such unremarkable hardware. Only switching from the browser with several Flash-laden websites open back to the home screen really caused any hiccup at all. Some will find the carousel on the home screen to be a tad annoying. I think it is a unique solution to the Android doldrums of a grid of tiles, and aside from requiring perhaps too much precision in making gestures and finger presses, I think it really does a decent job of conveying the "recent items" category without much fuss. There is a always a grid of favorites that can be configured below the carousel for those apps or functions used often.

Web browsing is not as "silky" smooth as Amazon
would have you believe, but it certainly gets the job done

Cloud storage is another feature the Kindle Fire relies on heavily. It only has 8GB of internal storage, so you are essentially required to store most of your media on the Amazon servers. One downside to that is that your Amazon Cloud Drive contents do not appear to be accessible from the Kindle Fire, which is rather disappointing. If there was one major change I would make, it would be to have this capability as many Prime members use their free 20GB of online storage and I don't see why Amazon would not use the opportunity to convince customers to purchase additional storage. If they could allow you to store media in the Cloud Drive and stream it using the Kindle Fire, that would add value to this platform. Media playback is exactly what you expect, without disappointments. The onboard speaker is only on one side of the unit, and of decent quality. Nothing stellar, but nothing offensive in that regard. Unfortunately there is no hardware button for volume, so you will have to access the top menu each time you want to adjust volume, which could get annoying when listening to music with the screen off or during video playback when the screen has to resize for the volume menu bar. Otherwise, video playback is smooth and loads quickly. Battery life is estimated around 8 hours while playing video, which is about 2 hours shy of the iPad. It certainly won't last as long as the Kindles of the past, but this is quite a bit more and lacks the e-ink display of those devices.

The revised Netflix interface
will be appreciated by subscribers

Most of the complaints I have seen focus on the lack of additional features on this device. I think many folks are missing the point here: Amazon is betting that customers don't need features like a camera, Bluetooth, microphone, dual core processor, or expandable storage. They removed these features and instead offer a low price and small form factor. While I would prefer to have additional storage for photos or music, Amazon has made their point about what their tablet is and what it isn't. It isn't a direct competitor to the iPad- it's smaller, costs half as much, relies heavily on the cloud, and is based on Android. However, it offers a lot for a little and still performs the task of being an e-Reader rather well, offering the Kindle collection of books as well as full color magazines, comics, and newspapers. Oh, and did I mention it only costs $200? This product really does bank on the fact that customers don't want their tablet to be another laptop without a keyboard, or a giant smartphone. Many will continue to believe the iPad is the epitome of a tablet, but some, myself included, believe that the tablet market is soon to change.