Amazon Kindle

[TinkTanker]

NYT Gadget Guru Rips The Kindle Fire, Says It Needs 'A Lot More Polish'

The Kindle Fire isn't ready for primetime, says New York Times gadget reviewer David Pogue.

Other than the $200 price tag, there isn't a lot that sounds compelling about Amazon's disruptive tablet after reading Pogue's review.

He says the Fire isn't as "versatile as a real tablet," and it's mostly made for consuming content. The problem with that is the Fire isn't good for content consumption.

This is the nut of Pogues problems with the Fire:

Most problematic, though, the Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you'd think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don't register. There are no progress or "wait" indicators, so you frequently don't know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn't been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.

He also says Amazon's vaunted Silk browser isn't particularly fast: "nytimes.com takes 10 seconds to load, eBay.com takes 17 seconds, Amazon.com takes 8 seconds. The iPad took about half as long each time."

The bottom line: Kindle Fire needs "a lot more polish," and you're best to wait for the Kindle Fire 2.0, which will be less buggy and sleeker.


http://www.businessinsider.com/pogue-review-of-kindle-fire-2011-11

[Eric]

Being an early adopter is fun/can suck.

[TinkTanker]

Another Bad Review For The Kindle Fire: Crappy Hardware, Laggy Software
Joshua Topolsky at The Verge has done a deep dive review of the Kindle Fire.

While his final score sounds good at 7.5 our of 10, if you read what's written, it sounds like the product is a 5 out of 10.

He says the hardware design is unoriginal and uninspired. The Silk browser isn't all that impressive, and it's pretty laggy overall.

However, here is the biggest warning sign in the review:

"I am confused about a number of decisions here, however. Unlike the PlayBook, iPad, or pretty much any other tablet on the market, the Fire has no hardware volume controls, meaning that you have to go through a series of taps (especially if the device is sleeping) to just change the volume. The Fire also has no "home" button — simply a small, hard-to-find nub along the bottom used for sleeping and waking the device, and powering up and down. That means that Amazon had to create software navigation for getting around the tablet, which would be fine... if the home button wasn't always disappearing into a hidden menu. Also, I found myself accidentally pressing the power button when I was typing or holding the tablet in certain positions, causing the Fire to think I wanted to shut it down. I'm not sure why it's located where it's located, but it seems like a poor choice to me."

http://www.businessinsider.com/kindle-fire-review-topolsky-2011-11

ETA: Full review at The Verge (whatever that is) http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/14/2560084/kindle-fire-review

[TinkTanker]

Not everyone says it sucks.

Early reviews of the Kindle Fire are running a wide range of opinion.

Engadget barely has a skeptical word to say about it. Gizmodo and Mashable acknowledge its advantages as readily as its flaws. And Wired totally refuses to buy the hype.

Here are some highlights from each review of the tablet that refuses to allow for consensus.

Engadget says:

    "This thing feels incredibly solid, as if Amazon simply put a chisel to a big piece of slate, gave it a good whack and then put the resulting slab into a Frustration-Free box."

    The 8 GB storage capacity: "You won't need much since Amazon so thoughtfully lets you re-download anything you've bought any time you want, and is quite happy to stream all your music to you as well. But, if you're the type who likes to load down your tablet before spending a few hours or days offline, you might find this single, tiny capacity a bit restrictive."

    The display: "What isn't so impressive is the 169ppi pixel density. With more and more smartphones starting to offer 1280 x 800 resolutions in displays that are four and five inches we might have hoped for a bit more here."

    On launching apps: "You swipe left or right through the carousel and then tap whatever you want to launch. But, if your finger moves even a pixel or two in any direction when tapping the chosen item won't launch...You have to be annoyingly precise to get your chosen thing to launch."

Gizmodo says:

    "The Fire doesn't feel like any other Android tablet—and that's a very, very good thing. From the minute you turn it on, the device is puzzlingly simple."

    "Oh, and that much bandied browser, Silk? It works just as well as Amazon said—pages rendered fine and rapidly, thanks to the cloud-crunching, and can be bookmarked, emailed (via Amazon's capable little native client), Facebook shared—and yes, tabbed."

    "But when it's not [responsive], it's awful. There's absolutely no excuse for a machine with these guts to be unable to turn pages with zero lag. It has two cores, for Chrissake."

    "It's not as powerful or capable as an iPad, but it's also a sliver of the price—and that $200 will let you jack into the Prime catalog (and the rest of your media collection) easily and comfortably."

Mashable says:

    "The $199 Amazon Kindle Fire is a worthy device. It's not an iPad slayer, but it could be the first tablet to ably stand atop Mount Tabulous with Apple's industry-dominating slab computer."

    "From the moment you turn it on to the first time you download music from your own personal cloud to the minute you start watching a movie on the device and then continue watching on your HDTV...you're hooked. This is a smart tablet with a fully thought-out ecosystem. It is...very Apple-like in its insistence in keeping you within the Amazon playground."

    "Sometimes the accelerometer gets stuck and the page you're looking at remains upside down. This happened to me repeatedly. Wi-Fi was easy to set-up, but was often slow to return after sleep. The device also does its own minicrashes. It does not shut down, but simply drops you out of what you were doing — reading a book or magazine, or looking at the home screen. The latter sometimes blanked out and reappeared."

Wired says:

    "The Fire is a fiendishly effective shopping portal in the guise of a 7-inch slate."

    "For every sin it commits as a reading device, the Fire atones with a good deed in video playback."

    "When your web page has loaded, it's still too small to really appreciate on the 7-inch screen. Pretty much all text must be tapped into a magnified view, and that's a telling indicator of why so many people avoided 7-inch tablets the first time they were floated to the public last year: They suck for web browsing. And that's a problem because web browsing is a key tablet responsibility."

    "The press has definitely supercharged Amazon's product launch with a level of hype and enthusiasm that would make Apple proud."


http://www.businessinsider.com/kindle-fire-reviews-2011-11

[Eric]

Wow... The kindle fire sounds like a big ole disappointment...

Cancelled my Fire preorder.

Are you sure?  Pre-orders have already shipped: http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/14/kindle-fire-shipping-a-day-early-for-those-that-pre-ordered/

[TinkTanker]

Cancelled it last night when they said it was wonky when reading comics.

[Eric]

Cancelled it last night when they said it was wonky when reading comics.

Ah.  Good deal on the cancellation, then -- sucky about the wonkiness.

[TinkTanker]

Don't get me wrong, comics is not the only thing I'd buy it for. But it is one of the things. There were conflicting reports about how zooming worked and I just got a bad feeling. I just had a gut feeling Amazon *might* ship early so those who ordered early would get theirs the same day they hit the Buy More and what not. I know I could send it back, but I just thought it would be a good idea to have my hands on one first.

[Spooky]

The Kindle fire is the bestest thing evuh and if you don't think so you are a poopyhead!

[Spooky]

The Fire user guide.

http://kindle.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle_Fire_Users_Guide.pdf