Tech DC

Lower Your Expectations

Wow, I had low expectations given the $199 price, but the Amazon Kindle Fire still managed to disappoint me.

Pros:

• $199

Cons:

Hardware

• Backlight bleeding all around the edge of the screen.
• Power button is badly placed and I’ve accidentally shut off the Fire several times when holding it.
• Super-reflective screen. Much more reflective and finger-print-showing than other tablets. (See picture)
• Poor battery life, at least compared to the iPad.
• 6 GB of usable space so you can’t load this up with movies. I guess Amazon wants this to be more of a streaming device. But you’re left with little space if you need to load this up for travel away from WiFi.
• Surprisingly heavy. I suppose this is because I’m used to holding Amazon’s similar sized e-ink tablets. But when you hold the Fire, the weight is the first thing you’ll notice.
• No mic, no cameras, no bluetooth, no SD card slot, no gyroscope (for better gaming control).
• No hardware Home button or volume buttons. From some pages, it takes a few software button presses to get to the volume controls.

Software

• Carousel interface for all your items is a terrible idea, made even worse by the fact that once you launch anything it goes in the Carousel and can not be removed. So you end up with a really long carousel with stuff you don’t want.
• Inconsistent UI. For example, when you reach the end of a scroll page, some pages bounce while other pages brighten on the edge.
• Slow UI response in many places such as pinch-to-zoom.
• Apps crash. On each of three Kindle Fire units we tested, Angry Birds crashed on first launch. It worked after that. The browser had several crashes.
• Flash works, but Flash videos are jerky to the point of being unwatchable.
• Slow browser. This is especially disappointing given that Amazon promoted the speed of it’s Silk browser.
• AppStore allows you to buy apps that don’t work properly on the Kindle Fire.
• AppStore search doesn’t work. Searching for “Netflix” resulted in four apps, none of which were the Netflix app. (See picture)
• AppStore has very few apps compared to other Android devices with Google Market.
• The magazines are just scans of the magazine. These aren’t nice PDFs with embedded fonts. So when you zoom, the text gets fuzzier. The aspect ratio of 16×9 doesn’t fit magazines well. There is empty space at the top and bottom when viewing the full page.
• There is one odd thing I haven’t figured out yet. When scrolling a web page, it looks as if the page tilts in the direction you are scrolling. I haven’t been able to capture this on camera. I can’t tell if this is a UI decision or a weird screen drawing or refresh issue.