So I Bought a Kindle Fire

Most manufacturers apply a skin to Android 2.3 and lower; the more complicated the skin, the longer updates tend to take. All of them by now either add functionality or have inspired upstream improvements in stock Android, but many of them can also cause additional lag on slower devices.

Android 3.X hasn’t really been completely re-skinned thus far, AFAIK, partly perhaps due to the source code lock (I can’t believe that too much, since major hardware devs DID get the code to implement it onto their tablets) or perhaps due to the fact that it presents such a radically different interface from Android 2.X that previous re-skin additions wouldn’t make as much sense on it.

So if you pick up a Honeycomb/Android 3.0 tablet, it will look mostly like any other Honeycomb tablet, less a few custom widgets and the like.

I’m looking for something that will let me enjoy all the pdf versions of Electronic Games, Electronic Fun, and CGW I’ve downloaded over the past few months. Also, some dedicated games, and e-books.

I preordered a Kindle Fire too, with the intent that if early reviews are bad, I can cancel it, but at least I have a place in line right now.

I’m looking forward to having a normal Kindle for reading, and a Kindle Fire for everything but reading. I’m confident the app ecosystem will be far better than any other non-iPad tablet, so here’s hoping it pays off!

How can it be? Excepting the built-in stuff, the app ecosystem is the Amazon App Store. You can use that today on just about any Android device you want. Conversely, you don’t have access to the Android Market on the Kindle Fire, so it’s a pure subset of any other device.

Primarily because there will be tens of millions of Kindle Fires out there, and probably 10% of that number for all other Android-based tablets combined. Amazon will be pushing developers hard to create Android applications specifically tailored for the Fire.

Specifically, having the Amazon market on there instead of the full Android market will be a benefit in the end, since they’ll be pushing applications specifically made for the Fire and certified to work correctly on the Fire.

I also know a couple of people at Amazon who have told me other things that make me optimistic about it, which I won’t share here :-)

I’m skeptical about how Fire-specific people will make their apps. Tested on the Fire, sure; developed with that as the lead-platform, fine. But Fire-exclusive? I doubt it.

And I’m not saying the Fire will be a failure – I don’t think it will be. I also do think that its stripped-down, content-focused UI will be good for its audience. But I don’t think it will have a better selection of apps than other tablets.

I’m sure there will an upgrade to phonegap and Flash CS5 (and everything else) pretty quickly that will make it very easy to export to the platform.

I’m not saying the Kindle Fire ecosystem will be as good as the iPad, or anywhere close, but it’ll almost certainly be multiple times bigger than every other Android tablet combined.

It’s a hot new platform developers will flock to in order to get their apps available to 5-10 million people facing a dearth of other content.

That’s fine, the Fire will be great for the Android tablet ecosystem. What I don’t understand is why you think that apps for the Fire will only work on the Fire and not on other Android devices. I mean, the Fire ISN’T a new platform, it’s the existing Android platform. Devs would have to go out of their way to make Fire exclusives.

Phonegap and Flash CS5 already work on Android. They don’t need an upgrade.

You guys do know that the Kindle runs Android, right?

I don’t get this either. If it’s available to the Fire than it will be available everywhere else-unless of course Amazon is planning on making millions of apps themselves and only distributing it through their app store.

I can believe that there will be apps that are only available in the Amazon App Store and not in the Android Market – I don’t think there will be MANY of them, because why not put it in the Android Market, if Amazon isn’t paying you – but even then: Just about all other devices can have the Amazon App Store, so… it’s still not a Fire exclusive.

I think the Fire’s impact on the ecosystem will be to make the Amazon App Store less of an oddity and more of a standard part of the Android ecosystem; and to prevent the use of post-Gingerbread APIs from really taking off for a while (although I think Google has made some of those APIs into redistributable things that you can include for use on pre-Honeycomb devices…).

I can believe that there will be apps that are only available in the Amazon App Store and not in the Android Market – I don’t think there will be MANY of them, because why not put it in the Android Market, if Amazon isn’t paying you – but even then: Just about all other devices can have the Amazon App Store, so… it’s still not a Fire exclusive.

This.

There’s zero reason to expect that Amazon is going to make some kind of secondary ecosystem separate from the rest of their android support.

What it will do is likely draw new folks to the android platform, and thus more developers, which will result in more apps, drawing more users, etc.

I know, I meant to specifically target the device.

I’m not saying exclusively for Fire, I’m saying apps that are specifically tailored for the Fire and might not work as well on other Android devices.

I think the main thing most people are forgetting is that the Fire is not some normal run-of-the-mill Android device. The underlying platform is Android, but forked from the rest of the devices using the OS, and will doubtlessly stray even further from the main Android branch every year. Amazon seems to have every intention to do whatever they want to do without Android without remotely thinking about cross-compatibility with other Android devices.

And yes, I do believe that Amazon will do a lot of contracting with developers and internal development to make things exclusively for the Amazon app store without it also going to the Android app store.

Getting one too.

I do a lot of traveling so I am looking forward to the video aspect of it. I just hope the 7inch screen is big enough. My daughter has an iPad and while I like it, I think the Fire will be great for me. I figure, internet, some games, magazines, and movies.

I will never give up my Nook for regular book reading, even taking 2 “tablets” on the road is no biggie, especially the size of the Fire. I am hoping that there will be a working netflix app on release. They do have an android app for the phones so it should be an easy thing.

My money is on Amazon making this thing good.

I don’t believe that. The instant they do that, they now have some AmazonOS that can’t run a lot of useful things that people might want to run. Android has a lot of apps for it, and if Fire becomes incompatible with Android, it loses access to that (including many apps that are currently sold by Amazon). I seriously doubt they’ll bother forking things in compatibility-breaking ways.

And yes, I do believe that Amazon will do a lot of contracting with developers and internal development to make things exclusively for the Amazon app store without it also going to the Android app store.

I wouldn’t be surprised at that, but I would be shocked if they didn’t allow/encourage those things to be sold on other devices. The Kindle Fire is their big Android device, but they make the money selling the content – they WANT the Amazon App Store on every Android device in the world.

A 7-inch screen is going to suck for that.

The iPad at 10 inches with slightly higher resolution is just slightly too low-res for reading scanned magazine pages (as opposed to magazine pages reformatted for tablets) zoomed out. Pages are just a little fuzzy for a standard-sized magazine, to the point that you usually want to zoom in one level. So then you have to scroll around as you read, which isn’t as nice as just throwing up the full page and reading it. Though everyone’s itching for a “retina” level screen, I’d think even going to 1280x1024 would make the difference.

So a 7-inch screen with less horizontal resolution (in portrait mode) is going to be even worse. Certainly usable if you zoom in and pan around, but that’s an annoying experience compared to just reading a paper page.

Note that I’m talking about scanned PDF publications. Publications that are specifically published in a PDF format for electronic reading (that is, text is actually rendered text and not a bitmapped image) is much better on the iPad. But still, if scanned magazines or comics are a key usage scenario, best to wait for a 10-inch Fire.

Yeah comics are barely doable on the iPad (and splash pages really hurt it). On a 7-inch with a crappier aspect ratio? Forget it.

Ask the first “professional-grade” 7" tablet RIM PlayBook how well it is doing. Still no Kindle app.