Review: Amazon's Kindle Fire: A dud or a real iPad contender?

When all those people who pre-ordered the Kindle Fire receive their tablets in the mail this week, they will rip open their new toy’s bespoke cardboard packaging — it looks nothing like a typical Amazon shipping box — and be greeted by a playful home screen that comes personalized with their very own name.

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These lucky few will bask in early adopter bliss. They will issue themselves hearty high-fives for having the foresight to purchase the year’s hottest gadget, sight unseen. And then they will marvel at a device that really does bring something fresh and clever to the tablet space — namely, an insanely low price.

But everything I describe above accounts for just the first five minutes of Kindle Fire use. The Fire isn’t a dud, but its real-world performance and utility match neither the benchmarks of public expectation, nor the standards set by the world’s best tablets.

The Fire’s 7-inch, 1024×600 screen is too small for many key tablet activities. The Fire’s processor, a 1GHz dual-core chip, appears all but insufficient for fluid, silky-smooth web browsing, an area where I found performance to be preternaturally slow. And unlike most of its tablet competitors, the Fire lacks a camera, 3G data connectivity, and a slot for removable storage.

As an assembly of physical components, the Fire lives at the bottom of the tablet food chain — and this limits what the Fire can actually do as a piece of mobile hardware. But all those consumers who pre-ordered the Fire knew this going in, right?

Hardware, Schmardware — Let’s Sell Some Content
The business press has celebrated the $200 Kindle Fire as an iPad killer — a loss-leading product that’s been priced to lure away potential iPad customers, with Amazon making back all its money (and then some) by selling untold petabytes of content from its own digital storefront. In effect: Amazon may not make margins on the tablet itself, but the Fire will catapult the company’s digital sales sky-high, and lob a Nelson Muntzian “Ha-hah!” directly in the face of Apple.

But that’s a business story. And it’s a story that may have left some consumers confused. The press has lauded Amazon’s strategy to goose digital sales, but the accolades shouldn’t have been interpreted as explicit endorsements of, well, a device that people might actually want to use in the real world.

I’ve been testing a Kindle Fire loaner unit for the last five days, and I’m impressed by how it elegantly repackages and streamlines every phase of the familiar Amazon purchasing experience. Indeed, the Fire is a fiendishly effective shopping portal in the guise of a 7-inch slate. It’s also a winning video playback device that uses Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon’s own digital storefront to deliver hundreds of thousands of movies and TV shows, many of them free.

And, yes, the Fire is pretty good bargain for anyone who’s only comfortable with cautious toe-dipping in our presently murky (and expensive) tablet waters. At $200, the Fire crosses an impulse-buy threshold — albeit a steep one — that Apple’s $500 entry-level iPad 2 can’t even approach.

All these enticing features are topped off by a free one-month subscription to Amazon Prime, the company’s premium membership service. Prime provides free two-day shipping on all physical deliveries, free access to some 13,000 streaming videos, and free access to Amazon’s Kindle Owners Lending Library. This library lets you borrow e-books from a selection of more than 5,000 titles, including 100-plus current and former New York Times bestsellers — one e-book at a time, and one borrow per month, but with no pesky due dates.

In total, Prime alone would seem to justify a Kindle Fire purchase — if not for the fact that the service is open to all Amazon customers for just $79 a year. This means one month of free Amazon Prime access is just a $6.58 value-add for anyone who buys the Kindle Fire.

All of which leads us back to what the Fire can actually do as a day-in, day-out mobile workhorse. Is it tablet that people will grab again and again for web browsing, book and magazine reading, casual gaming, and more?

No. It’s not that kind of tablet.

The User Interface: Let’s Start Buying Stuff!

The Fire’s home screen reskins the Android 2.3 user interface with a whimsical bookshelf metaphor. The uppermost bookshelf is home to the Fire’s so-called Carousel, a zippy, animated view of recently accessed apps, e-books, videos, magazines, music tracks, and even web pages. Below that you’ll find a series of smaller bookshelves to store your favorite pieces of content.

The overall home screen conceit is a design win. Similar to the “cover flow” view in various Apple music apps, the Carousel let’s you scroll through colorful, animated thumbnails of a wide variety of content items, adding much-needed user-interface sass to a tablet market that can’t seem to shake the “uniform icons on a static grid” metaphor.

Rife with icons for all sorts of media types, the Carousel also reminds us that, at its heart, the Kindle Fire is a media-consumption device. This point is further emphasized by seven simple menu items at the top of the home screen: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps and Web.

Seven simple menu items. The brevity of this navigation system is almost comforting. You need not stumble around for clues to divine the Kindle Fire’s intentions. In seven simple words, you’re told exactly what the tablet stands for: consuming — and ultimately buying — digital media.

The problem for Amazon, however, is that not all types of digital media sing on the Kindle Fire.

Concerned? Walk with me, then. Join me on a tour of the Fire’s key menu items. We’ll discover a wide spectrum of execution, ranging from triumphs to stumbles to out-right failures.

Newsstand: A Failed Attempt at Digital Downsizing
This is your virtual bookshelf for any digital magazine you’ve downloaded. It’s also where you purchase single copies and subscriptions of some 400 different full-color periodicals — digitized versions of glossy print fare as celebrated as Newsweek and National Geographic, and as obscure as Russian Life andPhilosophy Now. Amazon is making a big push to promote the Fire as a magazine-reading platform, an initiative underlined by a deal that delivers free, three-month subscriptions of 17 different Conde Nast magazines (including Wired) to Fire customers who act before March 1, 2012.

But there’s a problem: The Fire doesn’t offer a comfortable magazine reading experience.

Pixel for pixel, the tablet’s 1024×600 display actually delivers quite nice image quality. Swaddled in ultra-protective Gorilla Glass, the display uses in-plane switching (IPS) technology to deliver a bright, appropriately saturated screen image with solid off-axis viewing (meaning you can still see what’s on screen when looking at the display from an exaggerated angle).

Unfortunately, though, the screen isn’t adequately proportioned for magazine content.

Most real-world print magazines boast a per-page trim size in the neighborhood of 8.5×11 inches, and this doesn’t scale well to the Fire’s 3.5×6-inch screen. As a result, magazine pages — even when oriented one-up in portrait mode — are rendered illegibly small.

Yes, you can pinch out to view bigger text, and you can tap a “Text View” button to squeeze the magazine content into a format that reveals only words and key images. But is this really magazine reading? No, it doesn’t even approach that leisurely, “I’ll graze at my own pace” experience.

Worse yet, the Fire’s processor appears ill-prepared to quickly redraw visually intense digital magazine pages. Swiping from page to page occurs in disorienting stutter-steps, making any semblance of “reading” a chore.

It actually makes much more sense to read magazine content via the RSS feeds of the magazines’ companion websites — because, yes, almost all monthly print content eventually ends up online.

To read the rest of the Wired.com review, click here.

 

 

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