Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet: an in depth review - Page 4

I get that this is an Apple fan site. But if you can't achieve at least a veneer of impartiality when reviewing stuff from other companies, then you should stick to Apple products and not review them at all!

The word 'review' suggests some kind of critical evaluation - not just an excuse to point out the superiority of the Apple alternative which costs 2.5 times as much. Wouldn't you be shocked if a $499 product WASN'T easily superior to a $199 product? It's like saying that Intel's latest hex-core chip is far superior to the dual-core alternative.

Clue: comparing products is only meaningful when they're in the same market. Other sites have criticised the Fire too, but most of them have realised that it's quite plainly not intended to compete directly with the iPad.

In further news, Apple is already in progress on making the Kindle Fire mostly irrelevant.

Come on. Does anyone here not see the clues?

The iPod Touch hasn't been updated for over 14 months.

There are rumors and reports flying left and right that Apple is ordering 7" screens.

The competition has been helpless at the 10" range to compete so now they are moving to smaller screens.

So, I see Apple doing the following:

3-4" screen sizes - iPhone available from $0 (with contract) or if you don't want a contract pretty easily available online from $200-$300 dollars (for an unlocked iPhone 3Gs). This is pretty much the same price as the current iPod Touches.

7" screen size - New iPod Touch Pro (or iPad Mini if you so desire). I see this device replacing the current iPod Touch. Which would explain why Apple didn't spend any effort on upgrading it during this last development cycle. If they take a slight hit to their margins they could effectively offer this fabled product at basically the same price as the current iPod Touch - $199, $299, and $399.

10" screen size - iPad available for prices of $499, $599, $629, $699, $729, and $829.

11"+ screen sizes - MacBook Airs available from $999.

This just fits so perfectly into Apple modus operandi and the well known strength of their current CEO in production management, that I just cannot see them not doing this. And it fits with what they have done and the rumors casting about. Not to mention it pretty much eliminates the major advantage that the Kindle Fire has over anything offered by Apple, price point.

Isn't an equally relevant comparison to the iPod Touch rather than the iPad? It's the same price (for the entry model), lacks cellular connectivity and has the same memory (for the entry model).

http://q10a1.blogspot.com/2011/11/ki...mparisons.html

Oh. You're actually serious.

What!? This is absolutely wrong. I have a Kindle 3 (now called the keyboard edition) and I can de-register it from my Amazon account and assign it to a new one.

What else did you pass off as fact in this "review" that's also inaccurate?

I'm on to page #2 and find another inaccuracy...


No, you can't pin an app to your favorites by a touch and hold gesture. (Well technically, you do, because you touch and hold in the carousel and get a pop-up menu, but I digress...) You can, however, touch and hold anything within your favorites to move/position them wherever you want in the favorites area. The icons just don't "jiggle" but otherwise it works.

I personally own 2 iPhones (work & personal) and I just tried to touch and hold an app in my favorites on my Kindle Fire, and it just worked. Then again, I'm not Apple-biased against anything lacking the Apple logo.

Perhaps I should just stop reading this (*ahem*) review.

That's the POINT he's making. It has nothing to do with anti-anyone-else rhetoric. It's a difference in usability, and in this case, Apple got it absolutely right and Amazon can't copy it, so they have to go with a substandard means by which to do it.

From page #4:


Let's do a iPod/iPhone/iPad review based on some app that's buggy and crashes. Nah, that would never happen!

I own an iPod Touch 4g, a personal iPhone 4, a work iPhone 4, and support my wife's personal iPhone 4. I have absolutely no trouble navigating the Kindle Fire home area.

You don't think AppleInsider is biased? LOL

Good. That's fine for you.

I'm saying that from a usability standpoint, the devices differ. In this single case of usability, taken separately from every other, Apple is the clear victor.

I said absolutely nothing about the Kindle being unnavigable. I said Apple has a better solution.


Please don't put words in my mouth. All it takes is a glance over my real posts to see that you're lying about me.

Okay. I appreciate the site. Have it in my check-daily RSS feed reader and all that, but you can't help but be a little biased. "Biased" is subjective, so I'm not lying, it's my opinion.

On another note... from the review:


I agree that the iOS is more polished. Like it was said on page #1 of the review, this is 1.0 of the Kindle Fire, while iOS is on version 5.

But don't forget that the iOS wasn't perfect from day one. How easy it is to forget that, as one example, just two months ago our iOS devices had crap for notifications.

As for the Kindle Fire, it has it's issues. With a nod to Steve Jobs, I was extremely frustrated with the Silk browser's performance until I disabled plugins (a.k.a. Flash). Magically, it was 1000x better!

Another bonus for the Kindle over the iPhone 4/iPod Touch 4g is web browsing performance. For instance, I can actually browse Netflix's desktop version of their site and manage my queue on the Kindle Fire. That page is so slow that it's unusable on the iPhone/iPod. (Can't vouch for the iPad as I don't have one.)

The Netflix experience on the Kindle Fire is terrible, but I have to believe it's an app issue. Games like Plants vs. Zombies, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, play fine on the Kindle Fire. And unlike on my iPhone, when games with ads are loading new ads, the whole game doesn't stall or stutter for a few seconds.

The biggest area where the Kindle Fire lacks is that it does have rough edges. You can't organize Silk browser bookmarks into folders. The auto-correct spelling sometimes picks odd words as the preferred choice. Sometimes you click and the animation on screen indicates a click, but the Fire just sits there as if the click wasn't registered, so you have to click again.

It's definitely version 1.0, but so far in the review, I think some things are inaccurate and others are focusing on the wrong things.

My 2 cents...

Bottom line... is all the reviews are saying the same thing... you get what you pay for.

Not sure what's going on with your iPhone 4/iPod Touch 4g, but I just navigated to Netflix.com and managed my queue just fine on my iPhone 4 (and over 3G nonetheless).

Last Thursday, I had a chance for some good hands-on time with the Kindle Fire. A co-worker had just received his the night before and brought it in to show me. He gave it to me to try out for the day, so I spent the next 6-7 hours taking the Fire through it's paces. My impression was as follows:

What I liked

• The build quality. It seemed like a solid, well-built device if somewhat on the heavy side.
• It was fairly easy to use. Even finding the WiFi mac address was no more or less cumbersome than in iOS.
• The display was fairly good, though I did notice some red and blue fringing when reading an eBook.

What I didn't like

• For me, either the 7" size was too small or the aspect ratio didn't work. It was ok for eBooks and videos, but like the review, I found the size and/or aspect ratio lacking for just about everything else.
• The UI was clunky and lacked all the polish I'm used to with my iPhone and iPad. One example was how the home page would disappear and then re-render itself when rotating the Fire from portrait to landscape and back again. Also, flipping through the coverflow-style list of icons was an inconsistent exercise.
• Battery life was not what I had expected. Though I didn't use the Fire non-stop for the 6-7 hours (I was at work after all), I was surprised at how quickly the charge was depleted. By the end of the day, the Fire definitely needed to be charged.
• Various stalls and crashes which I almost never experience on my iDevices.

Bottom line: With the Kindle Fire, you get what you pay for. For many prospective tablet buyers on a budget, it'll probably be an attractive choice.

As a side note, the Fire went from having a 2-3 day lead time on Friday to being in stock today. Wonder what, if anything, that means.

There are always "glitches" in software (normally called "bugs"). Several times recently there have been bugs found in Windows and Mac that have apparently existed for years without being discovered. The key phrase in my remarks was "Apple would never release a product with as many (glitches, bugs, etc.)"

The Kindle Fire is a placeholder product (rumour has it that the "real" 2.0 Fire is set for release in less than six months), and a bug fest extraordinaire.

I really don't understand all the idiots criticising DED for being "biased" here for that reason. The Kindle Fire has been hugely panned in almost every review. It's an absolute piece of junk. Almost every reviewer has given it poorer marks and excoriated it even more than DED does here.

This is a fair review and a reasonably positive one given what everyone else is saying about it.

Anyone who thinks this is Daniel being "biased" needs a reality check.

I take it you disagree. Well, this is just speculation on my part and might be completely wrong.

But I still contend that Apple has long tried to tier their products and the price scale, and I also contend that one of the biggest assets that Apple seems to be wielding right now against their competition is their ability to soak up manufacturing supplies and capacity. This has been noted in numerous articles, in fact since this article there has been another one where ultrabook manufacturers cannot get aluminum bodies because Apple is absorbing the majority of the production capacity. By upsizing the screen of the iPod Touch the maintain their price distribution and deny their competition free reign of the 7" screen production capacity.

Then again, this might just be the next Mac Pro Mini. I suppose we will know in a few months.

Umm... While this might be technically true. It is practically false. To be price competitive manufacturers of tablets need to take advantage of the principle of keeping manufacturing cost low by relying on the economy of scale. Therefore, they need to stick to fairly common screen sizes, which is not a continuous line.

I mean for instance, look at the rumors flying about Amazon's upcoming 8.9" Kindle Fire. It isn't that size because that is what Amazon dictated instead of say an 8.7" or 9.2" screen. No, it is supposedly that size because LG and Samsung make a display that size already and are promoting it.

You've missed the point, I think.

There isn't a "continuous line". THEY'RE trying to make a "continuous line". I'm simply trying to illustrate that there's no gaps between the three points. It's not stairs that can be dissected and made shorter by adding more steps; it's a data plot with only three points. Connect these three and you have the entire spectrum.

I think you have valid points but it should be noted that the iPod Touch was never updated alongside Apple's flagship product, the iPhone. Always months later.

Whether Apple had to wait for some component for the iPhone 4S or simply wanting to move their two most profitable products that use mostly the same internals to be 6 months apart from each other is unknown, but makes sense that the Touch won't be updated until after the new year to allow component and market focus to go to the iPhone.

Ah, now that I see.

However, I will point out that there is a rather large gap left between the 9.7" point of that line and the 3.5" point of that line. Also, that size range is actually one that many people are looking for. Something bigger than a phone sized screen to make it easier to use, but smaller than the 9.7" of the iPad to make it easier to carry.

For instance, looking at your graphic drawn to scale:


This gap becomes even more important if it corresponds to a given price point.


That is true. The iPod Touch upgrade was typically released two to three months after the iPhone upgrade. And I would feel a lot more confident of the fact that they were planning to release an upgrade after the start of the new year if they hadn't basically promoted the announcement a month ago as a sort of upgrade.

Then again, it might have simply been a marketing ploy to try and salvage some holiday sales without actually having anything new to sell.

Again, I expect that we will find out in the next handful of months. Because, if Apple doesn't announce a 7" tablet about the same time that they announce the next iPad then I doubt that they will.

There is also the possibility that instead of releasing a smaller product that they might keep older iPads and reduce their price. This is another common tactic of Apple to fill in price points. My hesitation about believing this too much is that Apple has long tried to keep as few products as possible at competing price points, and if they keep the iPod Touch and older iPads then they will be competing at the same price point.

There you go, doing EXACTLY what the third-parties are doing. And look where that got them.

What? With an estimated four to six million Kindle Fires sold in this coming quarter?

I guess what I see isn't so much the size of the device as it is the price of the device that is important. If Apple could make an iPad profitable at $199 then the argument of 7" vs 9.7" becomes mostly a matter of preference.

It just seems much more feasible for any company to hit that sub-$200 sweet spot with a smaller screened device than an iPad.

At this point the $199 spot is a competition between the Kindle Fire and the iPod Touch. And I hate to say it, but it doesn't look too good for the iPod Touch at this time. If I remember correctly the iPod Touch sells about 10 million a quarter, and the Kindle Fire in its first quarter is projected to come within half of those sells.

I just don't see how Apple can afford to not answer this.

They did NOT rewrite the UI from the bottom up. They added the UISplitViewController for side-by-side master-detail views. They added automated support for larger icon sizes -- if present.

Everything else, from a development perspective, is the same. They did modify some of their own applications to better utilize the additional screen real estate, but that's not rewriting the UI from the ground up.

The following article shows just how much work goes into converting an existing iPhone app to an iPad app. Pretty much ONE build setting, and checking to see if you hardcoded any screen sizes.

http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.co...universal.html

So you're saying a split UI and different sized icons were all that were needed to adjust for a 3.5" 3:2 display into a 9.7" 4:3 display. That'll be your little secret¡

Or… you could accept that reality that both are CocoaTouch and are unique UIs designed independently for their primary I/O.

And I guess we can completely ignore all the default apps that are nothing like their iOS for iPhone counterpart, because that would totally decimate your argument even more.

As far as I can tell, this is an _unbiased_ DED article!

/me puts that date down in his Tablet of Memorable Events.

Yay. Look at me, Internet tough guy, arguing against someone on an online forum thread because I have nothing better to do at work. Yippie =)


Ah yes, us frugal types. The ones that can't afford to spend close to $1000 every year to get the latest and greatest from Cupertino. I believe we're referred to as "common folk," the unwahsed, non-baptised practitioners in the Church of Apple. We've never been touched by quality, so we'll accept any junk that comes our way as truth and be damn grateful for it as well!

....or, we simply don't feel compelled to spend over $500 on something we don't really need. Better yet, perhaps we just feel like the iPad is overkill for our purposes, and something that costs almost less than half the price accomplishes it beautifully (Netflix, ebooks, a few games and a browser more than satisfies most). No, the interface is not fluid as liquid, and no, it doesn't have the hundreds of thousands of apps you normally find on an iPad or Google Android tablet. But for goodness sake, its $200 freaking bucks, and the device feels solid when you use it. The UI will improve (just like iOS did), and the hardware will get even better (more storage, 3G, etc).

Having used both devices for an extended amount of time, the "safer" choice would be the iPad if you can afford it. But there is nothing inherently "wrong" with the Kindle Fire, and I do believe people will find a lot they like about it once they try one for themselves.

Did I mention it's only $200?

Well, let's be fair here. To your words, "Apple would never release a product with as many bugs," have you been completely asleep the last several years? MobileMe, iOS 5 crashes and glitches, iCloud and iTunes Match syncing issues, iPhone 4's antenna problems, iPhone 4S's battery problems. Apple is a fine company, and certainly they have a reputation for quality, but they're not perfect, and they never will be. Whenever you add new code, you introduce the opportunity for bugs. That will always be the case, and Apple is no exception.

Now, to the fault of Amazon, the Kindle Fire review units were all using unfinished code, which became the basis of many of the early reviewers. Immediately on the day of the launch, Amazon released an update for the Fire that addresses many of the performance issues reviewers had been dealing with for over a week. If you pick up and use a Kindle Fire today, many of those complaints don't hold water. Also, Amazon *never* billed this device as an iPad killer. The only people who were disappointed when they found it it wasn't an iPad killer were the same reviewers that hyped it up as Amazon's iPad killer for weeks. Taken for what it is, the Kindle Fire is an unbelievable value product.

I don't dare claim this article is 'bias,' although let's face it - humans are bias by nature. If you can afford an iPad, get an iPad. There's nothing about the Kindle Fire that will pull you away from that experience. But it isn't fair to call it a "placeholder" product either. It's version 1.0 of a new line of products from Amazon, and while it's lacking in some key areas (storage, connectivity, UI inconsistencies, etc), it genuinely feels like a solid product with a future, unlike many of the other "iPad killers" that have come to market, like the HP Touchpad or the Blackberry PlayBook, which are both dead in the water. It also feels like a solid product with a story, with Amazon's cloud services powering an Apple-like end-to-end experience, unlike just about every other Android-based tablet on the market.

For something that costs less than half the price of an entry-level iPad, you get a piece of hardware that looks and feels good in the hand, yet is humble and does not try to be what it isn't. It's a portal for digital content, with a rich ecosystem of services at a price that undercuts just about every tablet device being sold on the market. Best of all, it has a future in an ever-increasing flood of devices and manufacturers that are all trying to compete in the wrong areas.

Does the Kindle Fire revolutionize the world? No. Will it drive away sales from the iPad? Probably not. Will Amazon sell millions of these things and make a boat load of cash from the increase in Amazon content and services sold to consumers? You bet your butt they will. I did. I'm a satisfied customer.

(And just to deflect some of the impending nonsense, yes, I have used the iPad before. And yes, I use an iPhone. I've bought four of them, actually, on two different networks. So clearly, I go for the best product for my needs.)

Feel free, there is plenty of bias in there!

It's lightweight compared to the usual reviews of CPUs and GPUs on TomHardware and AnandTech... There people don't consider something "reviewed" unless you have 12 pages of text with each page having at least 5 benchmarks.

Ah, back in the day when I was "into" the GPU scene. You just couldn't run enough benchmarks back then. Now I have an Xbox360. Never EVER going back to PC gaming unless... well, it's very unlikely. \

sadly, your comments show a surprising level of naivety. All one has to do is take a quick glance at what people are actually doing with iPads to see that not only is it replacing the laptop, it is doing alot of things the laptop couldn't. Speaking from experience, my iPad very quickly replaced my laptop for everything. So much so that after a year and only using the laptop maybe twice, I gave it away to my mother.

Lastly, no, flash videos is not a big deal.

First off, you really should do some research before bumbling off at the gums in front of a global audience. You've already been given a couple work related examples for the ipad at work. I'll give you another. Home Depot, one of the largest retailers in the world, requires their management teams to use ipads in conjunction with Salesforce.com in order to conduct daily business. The medical profession is also using the ipad and custom apps like never before. The list goes on, and you are a nob.

By the way, news flash, Adobe has abandoned any future development for Flash. I guess you missed the memo. So get your head out and pay attention.

You make that sound like a bad thing, but AnandTech's reviews are pretty much perfect. Some critical reading skill required, of course. Reading all of the benchmarks instead of selectively jumping through the ones that matter for your particular use case would be a waste of time.

What in the name of holy mackerel is "the GPU scene"?
So you are willing to throw away a tremendous amount of versatility and performance to gain a little bit of convenience and/or price savings, which is also what people opting for a Kindle Fire over an iPad are doing.
Somehow I suspect the "fair and balanced" gentlemen of this thread are not going to condemn your choice on equal criteria they condemn a Fire purchase, nor are they going to make personal insults towards you for having a different personal preference.

Nice story, but demonstrably wrong.

I want a device small enough to fit in a jacket pocket so I can always have it on hand, yet has a screen large enough to draw on. iPhone can't do that, iPad can't do that. Apple's lineup has a gap. QED.

As for the iPod Touch, every mobile phone these days has sufficient ability to play music, and mobile touchscreen gaming in 3.5" is a bad joke. I really can't see a reason to buy one. Growing it to a larger screen size like mknopp suggests would at least give it some edge over the iPhone as an entertainment device. 7" isn't the only choice, of course. Going to 5" or so would retain great portability.

I keep hearing this stuff about jacket pockets

I've never had a single jacket large enough to have pockets large enough to hold something with a 7" screen. That's crazy. And I used to be HUGE, for crying out loud; I'd know if jackets had pockets that large!

You want something always on hand, you have the iPhone. Need something larger, you have the iPad. QED.

I'm looking at the Galaxy Note which has a 5.3" screen and definitely goes into a jacket pocket, cargo pocket, any size bag etc.

You effectively repeated my analysis of how neither Apple device does what I want (which means the lineup has a gap). Not sure what your point was in doing so.

Since you mentioned it, I just checked to see if my wife's Nook Color, 7" screen I think, would fit in a jacket pocket. Thin hiking jacket? Not well. I wouldn't trust it to stay, but it does fit. My heavier ski jacket? No problem at all. Inside pocket on a suit coat? Yup, it fits, but snug (makes the suit coat hang like crap tho.) FWIW I'm not a large man at all, a 42R. Her long leather jacket has plenty of pocket space for it.

Note that the Nook has a pretty wide bezel. Apple would be more than capable of shrinking that I would think. An iPad, or call it an iPod Touch if it makes you more comfortable, with a 7" screen would be quite portable and convenient IMO.

And what OS would you run on it? Is it an iPod, in which case you're blowing up a small display with a corresponding decrease in resolution? Or is it an iPad, where you're shrinking the display and making the touch targets smaller and more difficult to use?

That's why the 7" tablets are tweeners with no future.

OS != UI

What you mean is Apple's 7" tablets are tweeners with no future as long as Apple doesn't have a well-scaling mobile UI.

A 5+" iPod Touch could use the exact same UI with iPhone no problem, have a massive portability advantage compared to tablets, and have a massive media-watching and gaming advantage compared to iPhone.