Fire it Up: Amazon’s Kindle Fire (REVIEW)

When the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s first tablet, was announced in early October, people went wild for it, thinking it would be the iPad killer. Now, after about a month of its being out, it is clear that it is no iPad killer, and since its release there have been some complaints about its performance. Still, the Kindle Fire just might break the market as a solid tablet for a price that you can’t argue with. 

Amazon’s entry to the tablet game comes with a lot of brave decisions on the business and content sides. First off, it doesn’t decide to go head to head with the iPad, and it’s for this that I will say that it is no iPad killer. Costing less than half the price of the lowest-configuration iPad, and also being the cheapest good tablet out there (sure there are dirt cheap tablets available, but these make you pay in terms of UI, pathetic battery life, and other hardware concerns), the Kindle Fire just plain undercuts all competitors and still delivers a great product. 

 

Most people who buy the Kindle Fire will be buying it not because they are techies, but because they are book fans, or they want to try out tablets. Thus, selling it for cheap works for Amazon. They make their money not through the sales of the hardware itself but through selling content or through Amazon Prime memberships, which greatly enhance the Kindle Fire experience. Which is to say, really, that if you are having second thoughts, then know that when you buy this product you will be getting your money’s worth. 

 

Instead of telling you about specs, I’ll tell you about performance. First off, the Kindle Fire operates on a system based on Google Android, but that Amazon built on top of. This means an OS that functions a lot like Android, and that will allow you to install Android apps, but also one that centers on providing you with Amazon content and a distinctly Amazon experience.

 

 

What is this Amazon experience? From my own use of it, it’s strongly centered on reading. As an ebook reader, it’s a great device. It’s more customizable in its reading options than the Nook and it’s easy to navigate and get your books. Syncing with other devices is easy and downloading or sideloading books is a cinch. Even better, with the Prime membership you can borrow a book a month from a long list of books made available by Amazon (this feature has generated a lot of trouble with publishers, but in the end, it’s the readers who are benefitting). There’s also the great book lending feature, which allows you to borrow and lend ebooks from friends. When you lend a book, it becomes unavailable to you for fourteen days, in which time your friend can read it on their devices.

Beyond books are other media like movies and TV shows. However, this was a problem when I tried to access them. There’s a wealth of free content available for streaming, but I couldn’t get to any of it. I’m not sure if it’s my bandwidth, but I couldn’t stream any of the series or movies that I tried to get into. Despite that problem, I decided to try to watch other things on the Kindle. It plays .mp4, among other video formats, so I sideloaded some videos and these came out looking really good and crisp. I wouldn’t go so far as to start commending its HD capability, but the video output is more than satisfactory for viewing movies and TV series, if you really want to do that (I’m generally not a fan of viewing things on a small screen, so I haven’t made much use of the feature, but hey, it’s there if you need it). 

 

Along with video content you get a good digital music player in the Kindle Fire too. Once again region purchasing issues become a problem, but I decided to just load music straight into the Fire and it was alright. It’s a bit unwieldy as a big music player if you’ve become accustomed to the front-pocket friendly iPod, but it functions alright and if you can do with not having any side buttons or other ways to control the music than the screen, it’s a passable player too. 

 

Speaking of buttons, that’s one of the issues with the Kindle Fire that has come up. The tablet has a clean front with no covers, and in fact everything is run through and controlled with the touchscreen, with only one button for waking it up and for turning it on and off. This is good aesthetically, but it does bring about a problem. Along with the aforementioned lack of controls for things like volume (and the volume isn’t controlled in the music player screen either, but rather in the general settings; sure it only takes two taps to get there, but still this could have been more elegantly built into the music player) the placement of the single button, on the device’s bottom, can become a problem. Hold it the wrong way and you might wind up turning it off. Similarly, lay it on a surface and it’s that button that gets pushed. One remedy has been to just flip the device upside down. Sure that works, but then I shouldn’t be looking for a workaround in the first place.

 

The button placement is a small design criticism, but it’s something that I can live with. Otherwise the Fire has a clean, smooth physical design. While lacking the design flourish of the Nook, the Kindle Fire’s simplicity and portability make it a pretty machine to hold and look at. It’s not that heavy (if you’re used to reading hardbound books this is nothing) but you might find it getting uncomfortable to hold up after twenty minutes and you’ll be shifting weight. 

 

A more pressing concern is the device’s apps. While ideally Amazon has a wealth of apps, its App Store is currently unavailable to us in the Philippines. That’s a major bummer and it makes a strong argument for just getting an e-ink Kindle, since you can’t maximize what the tablet does through conventional means. However, you can actually download Android apps and install them to the Kindle Fire. Of course Amazon won’t teach you how to do that, as it subverts their own app store, but, hey, they are the ones stopping us from buying things when we want to pay, and it’s easy enough to learn how to do this using a little bit of google. 

 

That said, once you’ve got your essential apps on the device, it generally works great. There’s been a lot of talk about the speed of the Silk browser, and in general it delivers. It is considerably faster than a lot of the mobile browsers I’ve used. So productivity, surfing the net, and social networking are all covered. You can do all this stuff and best of all it’s small enough to fit in a pocket (I carry mine around in my back pocket usually).

I don’t know if I’ve just been lucky, as I haven’t encountered any of the problems that people have been complaining in the forums online. But thus far, I can’t help but recommend the Kindle Fire to friends who want to try out their first reader or their first tablet. While people who want dedicated reading are better off getting e-ink readers, the Fire has the wow factor that I think will sell people on reading e-books. And as a cheap tablet it performs remarkably well.
 

What I get from the Kindle Fire is the feeling that more people will be using tablets. It’s this optimism that comes from using a product that doesn’t necessarily revolutionize things (in the way that the iPad did), but that suddenly makes technology so easy and cheap that more people will readily take to it.