Kindle Fire Review

Following last week’s slightly screenbreaking review of music, it feels right to continue the trend and review a “screen.” I recently purchased Amazon’s Kindle Fire. In trying to decide if I should purchase the tablet, I found a ton of cruelly unfair or obviously biased reviews. As a Screenfix writer, I’m not one to let that stand. I’ll try to answer a few of the questions that I asked when I was looking to buy.

Screenfix does not recommend holding your Kindle Fire like this EVER

Is it an Android tablet?

Technically, the answer is yes. Practically, the answer is more fuzzy. The Fire runs on a customized Gingerbread (Android 2.3) OS. It features the Amazon appstore prominently and lacks many of the features and layout that define the “Android Experience.” For full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’ve never owned an Android device and have had only minimal contact with one.

This is a branded device right from the start. The Kindle name is everywhere and in fact the typical Android appstore is completely lacking on the device. It does not feature the customization that I understand is available on most Android Tablets. You have some ability to add apps to a favorite bar and that is the extent of your ability to customize.

It has come to my attention that it is possible to jailbreak your device and add back in some of the typical Android functionality if you desire it, but that comes along with the warranty-voiding side effects that rooting a device usually does.

Is it an iPad?

If there was any single point I could stress the strongest it is this one. The Kindle Fire is not a cheaper iPad. Let me say that again just to really drive it home. The Kindle Fire is NOT a cheaper iPad. If you are looking for an iPad but cannot afford one and think that the Kindle Fire could be a cheaper version to help you get your iPad fix without dishing out the big bucks you really need to walk away from the Fire and really think hard about your life.

The problem here comes primarily from Amazon. The Fire is a tablet and Amazon would love for you to buy one rather than buying an iPad. Because of this, they have avoided this point of contention and really gotten themselves in trouble. The best way to think about the issue is like this: the iPad is trying to fill the niche of the personal computer, but on a tablet. The Kindle Fire on the other hand is, at its core, an e-reader with extra media consumption features. If you are looking to throw away your laptop and buy a tablet, the Kindle Fire is not for you. If you are looking for a device that will let you read books, watch movies, catch up on comics, and listen to music then the Kindle Fire could be right for you.

What if I don’t read?

If the previous question was the most important overall, this question was perhaps the most important to me. I consume books rapidly and almost constantly. I do this mostly through the medium of audiobooks. Long commute times have driven me away from visual reading and into the habit of pumping books straight into my brain via audio.

If you are the kind of person who doesn’t read books, there are still a lot of things that you can do with the Kindle Fire. So far I haven’t played around with the Amazon Prime streaming extensively, but what little I have used seemed feature filled and easy to use. It is obviously going to guide you to buying episodes or movies since the “dark secret” about Fire is that its goal is to get you to buy things from Amazon. That said, there was a reasonable selection of Prime streaming content and you can always install the Netflix app.

Is it too small?

The Kindle Fire is about the size of a paperback book. If I were going to use the device primarily to watch video I would agree that the 7-inch display is a little small. In terms of displaying text or a web page though it feels about the right size. It’s not too big to easily carry around with you anywhere you need it but it is also so small that you can only display three words on it.

Is it too slow?

This was a big complaint that I saw again and again while looking at reviews. A lot of people have said that the scaling pinch is more sluggish on the Kindle Fire than it is on the iPad. I stood in a Best Buy for a half an hour pinching images and webpages bigger and smaller over and over on both the iPad and the Fire. Quite honestly people who say the Fire is lot slower need to relax a bit. If the Fire was any slower I couldn’t really tell a difference. Rotating the screen is another thing people point to as being significantly slower on the Fire. When you rotate the screen on the iPad, all of the app buttons rotate smoothly and the background transitions between portrait and landscape in about 2 seconds. The Kindle Fire rotates the background and rebuilds the cover flow app selector in about 4 seconds. It is my understanding that Apple smooths over this transition by actually rotating a picture of your desktop rather than actually rebuilding it like the Fire does. Inside a book or an image, though, the game is completely different. Hands down the Kindle rotates a book and flips pages much faster than an iPad. The transition is practically instantaneous. So it boils down to what is more important to you. If you want your apps to work tightly and don’t mind the extra 2 seconds on the home screen, then the Kindle Fire will be fast enough for you. If the 2 seconds it takes longer than the iPad to rotate really bothers you, then perhaps you really need to remember to stop insisting everything be instant and enjoy life.

So there you have it. I have been enjoying my Kindle Fire quite a lot. I set it up with my Audible account and plan to start using it in lieu of my iPod to listen to books soon. I’m looking further into getting some more comics to read. It was a little odd that it didn’t come with a USB cable out of the box but it is a generic mini-USB cable and was not expensive. I’ve found the battery life to be more than decent. In general, any issues I thought I might have had with the Fire went away as soon as I got it in my hands. I’m hoping that soon I’ll be able to trick myself into actually reading a book again.