Kindle Fire Reviewed: Do Not Compare to iPad
The Kindle Fire is fine, just fine.
The Kindle Fire is fine, just fine.
Now that the Kindle Fire, Amazon's $200 tablet, is here, tech
journalists and early adopters will try to answer the question that's
been burning on everyone's minds since Amazon announced the Fire in
October: will this device be an iPad killer, or even a competitor? Now
that I have the device in my hands, I can say that the answer is no--on
both counts. The iPad and Kindle Fire are not in the same category of
device at all. The iPad is an evolution of the personal computer--it's a
portable, multi-purpose device on which one can consume, but also
create, all kinds of content. The Kindle Fire is really a distant
relation of the handheld portable TV that was popular about 20 years
ago--you can consume lots of things fairly effortlessly on the
Fire--movies, music, magazines, some kinds of apps, and, more
importantly for us, books; but the Fire's real innovation is how easy,
and tempting, the device makes buying content--from Amazon.
Overview
The Kindle Fire is about the size of a paperback but feels as heavy
as a hardcover. It's pleasing to hold--less awkward than the iPad--if a
bit too heavy for its size. It feels more like a large smartphone than
a small iPad (and the world of tablets really is iPad vs. everything
else, with the Kindle Fire poised to become a very large percentage of
"everything else"). The screen's fine to look at, but one feels the
encroachment of its edges, the end of one's content and the beginning of
real life, all the time, which is not ideal. The device has 8GB of
onboard storage, not too much, but Amazon's cloud, where all the content
that works with the Fire is stored, is ever accessible, assuming one
has Wi-Fi (there's no 3G option).
The OS is Android with a thick, Amazon-built, skin on top, which
reduces the device to specifically those activities Amazon thinks most
people care about, represented by the seven menu items that are the main
choices on the home screen--Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps,
Web (and Docs, which allows you to email Docs to the device for
reading, feels like an afterthought, a placeholder). And in the upper
right corner of all of those content areas is a link to the Amazon store
where you can buy more of that kind of content. Inside each area is a
button that toggles between content downloaded to the device and content
in the cloud. One nice feature of the Fire is you really never need to
connect the device to a computer (though you can, in order to manually
transfer content, if you supply your own mini USB cable).
While Amazon's done a good job of making all the screens feel
branded and nicely designed, the user interface itself is surprisingly
awkward. There are no actual buttons on the device except the little on/
off button on the bottom, so all the navigation happens on the touch
screen, and it's a bit fussy. You'll get a lot of fingerprints on the
lower left corner of the screen, where the home icon is, which is the
only way (except repeatedly tapping a "back" arrow) to get to the home
screen, where your icons--not just for apps, but for particular albums,
songs, Web sites, books or movies that you recently used--live. Amazon
created a very simple metaphor for finding your stuff on the Fire--a
carousel that puts the most recently used thing, be it app, book, or
movie, at the top of an endlessly scrolling pile. You can also pin
favorite pieces of content to a series of "favorite" shelves beneath the
carousel. It works fine as long as you pretty much use the same few
things every time you pick up your device.
Content
I'll be brief here and then skip ahead to the e-reading experience.
Basically, the content players/ viewers are fine--nothing special, but
nothing really missing (except that the small screen size doesn't quite
match the shape of the Web or a movie screen). The nicest feature, in
all areas, is how easy it is to stream content right from Amazon--if
you're a Prime member, you click on one of the 10,000 movies Amazon
offers as one of the perks of Prime, and it starts playing pretty
quickly. If you've got music uploaded to your Amazon Cloud Drive, you
click into music, find the song you want, click it, and it starts
playing. Video is probably the coolest and most effortless feature of
the Fire.
You get apps from Amazon's curated Android app store; it's nothing
like Apple's huge app ecosystem, but it's fine, and Amazon seems to have
weeded out the crap apps.
The Web browser, Amazon Silk, which Amazon said would be super-fast
due to the way it splits the work of browsing the Web between the
device and Amazon's servers, isn't very fast at all. It's actually
rather awkward and slow, and the screen isn't the right size for the
Web. Harumph. The device comes with a basic email program, which is
fine.
E-Reading
Despite Jeff Bezos' professed passion for books, the actual
e-reading experience on the Fire is nothing to write home about. It's
basically the same experience as the Kindle Web Reader, Amazon's
browser-based e-reading solution. Meaning it's even less feature-filled
than the Kindle app on iOS devices. Most surprising to me is the
absence of those cute page-turning animations--pages just flick rapidly
from one to the next without any book simulation. Perhaps page flips
will be added in a future update.
The main reason to go to the Kindle store is the breadth of
available books, and they're all there, ready to rain down onto your
device. And Prime members get access to Amazon's controversial new
Kindle Lending LIbrary, which lets them borrow one book a month for
free.
I didn't get to try the much-touted DC graphic novels that Amazon
said would be a big part of the Fire because the ones I wanted--like
Alan Moore's Watchmen, aren't out yet.
But, again, the e-reading experience is fine. Not extraordinary in any way, but fine.
Summary
If you've used an iPad, using the Kindle Fire will most likely
remind you how much attention Apple does pay to design, user experience,
deep detail. Apple thought long and hard not just about the features
almost everybody will want all the time, but which some people will want
sometimes. Apple is passionate about its products, whatever else it
is. The iPad is a pleasure, sometimes even a mystery, to hold, explore
and use. The Kindle Fire is a black rectangle with a screen that let's
you basically do seven things.
That said, it's about to become "the rest" of the tablet market,
everything but the iPad. For users who don't want a sexy
category-defying mini computer, this device will be the go-to tablet,
easy to get, cheap to buy, filled with content.
Finally, despite
its seeming passion for books, Amazon is not a device company; it's a
company that has irrevocably changed, and innovated, retail, and that's
what it's doing again with the Kindle Fire. Bezos has gotten customers
to pay him (although the FIre is a loss leader) for the privilege of
owning their own portable comprehensive Amazon shopping experience.
What he is probably most excited to sell a lot of are Amazon Prime
subscriptions, which come with, of course, the free video content and
the lending library, but, most importantly, with free two-day shipping,
meaning if you're feeling too lazy to walk over to the store to buy your
toothbrush (or toaster, or boxer shorts or whatever), you'll just order
it from Amazon. This device is all about buying stuff, and lots and
lots of people are going to buy it, and the Amazon content and hard
goods it sells, this holiday season.
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