With the introduction of the new Kindle Fire, Amazon appears to have a hit on their hands. You can find all of the usual sites raving about the device in their reviews. Some are even calling it the newest and best iPad competitor. But is it? Is it worth all of the hype and, most importantly, is it worth your money?
To get to the truth, let’s take a look at the hits and misses for the Fire.
Hits
Interface
If you have spent anytime playing with any other Android-based device you will undoubtedly feel like many others that the interface is often clunky and can be frustrating. The Kindle Fire, however, does not suffer from this problem. In fact, the interface is down-right smooth and simple. This is due to the fact that the developers at Amazon actually took the time to move the interface forward to a point that a non-geek would be willing, able, and happy to interact with the Android OS.
Size
The size of the Kindle Fire is a big hit as well. Unlike the iPad and other larger tablets, the Kindle fire is easily held in one hand, and weighs only 14.6 ounces, which is considerably less than its competitors. The screen is still large enough to be able to watch a movie or other video comfortably. If you are going to be using this as a reading device very often, you will be comfortable with the page size as it approximates a paperback book.
Display
Displaying 16 million colors on 169 pixels per inch gives the Kindle Fire a great looking display that is worthy of high definition content. Reading books on this may not be quite the experience that the Kindle is with its superior eInk display, but it is still comfortable to read from.
Apps in the Cloud
The internal storage of the Kindle Fire is only 8GB, but with the availability of being able to run apps from the cloud when connected to wifi, thus not having to save them to the device, makes it possible to save space on the device for just what you want to have available when you are away from wifi. This makes it possible to save many more apps than the device could actually hold with the amount of memory it has.
Amazon Markets
Just like Apple has developed an ecosystem of movies, TV shows, and music for purchasing from their device, Amazon has developed an infrastructure to make sure you aren’t missing your iTunes and App Store. With over 17 million songs, thousands of movies, and hundreds of TV shows available you will have plenty of media available to devour on the Kindle Fire. Of course there are still the hundreds of thousands of books, the Amazon Android app market and the rest of the shopping options on Amazon. The Amazon Kindle will give you plenty of options for all of your shopping and media needs.
Whisper Sync for Movies
One of the cool features of the Kindle reading devices was the fact that if you were reading a book on your Kindle and then later picked up your iPhone, iPad, or other device with the Kindle app on it, you could start from the page you stopped on the last time. This same feature has been introduced for movies. If you start a movie on the Kindle Fire and have to stop it, you can pick up where you left off on any device that will stream Amazon content.
Price
One of the best selling points for the Kindle Fire is the price. At $199 it is amazingly priced hundreds of dollars lower than any of it’s real competitors. You could buy two Kindle Fires for the price of one iPad and have money left over for apps, music, and an Amazon Prime membership. This may be the most bang-for-the-buck device released in a long time!!
OK, so after all of the good, you may be thinking that this is a no-brainer and that this device is perfect. Well, lets get the to the areas where the Kindle Fire may have missed the mark.
Misses
Camera
The Kindle Fire has no camera. None. Not even a bad one. Many will think that this is not a big deal, and if you are in that group, then this will not be a big deal for you. For me, however, this is a big miss. I carry my iPhone everywhere and I am always snapping pictures with it. I have more photography apps on my iPhone than any other two types of apps compared. Keeping the price low on the device was probably the reason for the missing camera, but for me this is major.
Expandable Memory
As mentioned earlier, there is only 8GB of memory on the Kindle Fire. Even with the Apps in the Cloud feature mentioned above, it would be nice to have the ability to insert an SD Card with all of my favorite images, ripped DVD’s, etc.
Sound Input
One of my favorite apps is Skype. Being able to be out and pull this up and make calls to others without having to dig out my phone is a great thing. With the Kindle Fire this will not be a possibility. There is no built-in microphone and the jack for the headset does not work with the headsets with a microphone. There is no way to use a microphone. Again, a big miss for me.
Bluetooth
As far as I can tell there is no Bluetooth available on the Kindle Fire. With the absence of any kind of connection for external devices like a keyboard Bluetooth would be a way to use these types of device. True, this device may not be intended for heavy use for things like blogging, but what if I’m at the coffee shop and I need to check my email or share a long thought on Facebook? I’m not going to want to do all of that typing on the screen.
There you have it, the big hits and misses for the Kindle Fire. If you take a look at this and the positives outweigh the negatives, then I’m sure you will be happy with the Kindle Fire, however, if you are still on the fence, like I am, waiting might be a good idea. I will be waiting for the second generation that I suspect will be coming sooner rather than later. I have a feeling that this will just be a stop-gap measure for Amazon until they can put out an actual iPad competitor with the missing features listed above. Getting a great new tablet to market before Christmas is a great idea. The Kindle Fire will be a big hit, and it deserves to be, but it’s just not quite there for me yet.
Amazon, if you happen to be reading this, I’ll gladly give you the originally rumored price of $250 for an improved Kindle Fire with the missing features listed above.
Brain Droppings 