Keep in mind all the Apple fanboys were 100% sure the original Kindle would flop too. Why in this very forum was a chuckleicious thread called “Amazon Kindle - a pre-failed device”. Good call guys!
I messed around with a buddy’s Fire today, and thought it was a pretty decent little media consumption device. I still want a 10" version, but for $200 I was well impressed.
To be fair, the original Kindle did suck A LOT. If Amazon had introduced something like the Kindle 3 for $199 back then, the reaction would have been very different.
But to be fairer, that’s how it’s going to go with the Fire too: This first Fire might have a lot of flaws. But the second KindleFire will be better, and probably even cheaper somehow. And the third will be better yet. Plus they’ll probably do a lot of software update stuff that improves it on the fly.
Just like all of the specific criticisms of the original Kindle were on-target – it was godawful ugly, the screen wasn’t contrasty enough, $399 was too expensive – but irrelevant, so it’ll be with the Fire critiques in a year or so.
Err, no. Each successive generation was a huge improvement, but the original kindle was an extremely expensive turd sandwich. The fire, on the other hand, is a neat little device at the right price, its software is just a bit janky.
Once the cyanogen guys get android 4.0 running, both the fire and nook tablet will be sexy little pieces of ass.
All true BUT there is a significant difference. The Kindle 1 offered something, perhaps two things, that had not been done before; e-ink and always on 3g. The Kindle Fire has no such luxury now. Everything it does, someone else does it better. It has to rely upon the handful of proprietary Amazon features to get it to work.
Seeing how poor in performance the Fire is, i imagine that Amazon rolled out many of these “new” features (cloud sync ect) in the past months just to try and give something to the Fire that was unique.
It just appears that Amazon was taken aback by how popular the Nook was but i believe they also underestimated that much of that popularity was due to the ability to hack it into an iPad-lite. In any event they saw B&N moving into to the “color LCD reader” market and seeing as Amazon was poised to kill off all brick and mortar chains with the Kindle e-ink panicked and hastily made a tablet to try and plug, what to my mind is, a not very wide gap. A 200$ ipad wanna-be that isn’t a very good wanna-be is not an easy sell. Especially since it looks like Best Buy will be selling Gen 1 iPads for 300$ this year. It well sell fairly well, but i’m not sure if it will emerge as the #2 tablet.
I know one thing for sure - the web browsing on this thing is fucking awful. I cannot believe how slow it loads web pages, and if those pages have anything remotely advanced going on, the scrolling is incredibly slow.
Is that true of like, Firefox and Dolphin and Opera too?
Because it’s not great hardware, but it seems like it should be able to at least browse the web as well as a prev-gen phone.
The hardware is fine. It’s got a dualcore 1Ghz ARM A9 CPU, same as the ipad2. The UI probably isn’t GPU accelerated, though. Very few android devices have GPU acceleration-- that’s coming in 4.0. If you’re used to IOS, scrolling around in android feels bad.
Be that as it may, the reviewers who are ripping on the browser are often people who’ve had much more positive things to say about the browser in, say, the Galaxy S II. Or even the Nexus S, which should be slower than the KF.
So either Amazon’s much vaunted Silk technology is making things worse or there’s some hidden bottleneck on that hardware.
I wouldn’t mind having an ipad, but I don’t feel like spending $600 for one. After loading up newsrob (sideloaded from my droid x), evernote, the free-app-of-the-day email app from today, and some misc fun stuff (popcap games, fantasy football crap, etc), my Fire is doing pretty much everything I wanted it to do.
Is it the fastest browser ever? I guess not, but it’s working well enough that I don’t really notice it.
I’m perfectly happy with it as it is; and, once there’s a stable cyanogen for it, I’ll probably switch over to that instead, so’s to get VPN capability. I’ll easily get $200 worth of use out of it either way, though.
What’d be really cool would be if Google would release a side-loadable marketplace so I can get at apps I’ve already purchased there, along with the full suite of Google apps, without having to bounce the apk’s from my phone to my PC.
He’s also the guy whose product actually made me buy a Kindle but whatever. And it’s not an Apple blog.
Yes - but everything someone else does, the Kindle Fire does cheaper.
It’s pretty amusing with the negative reviews, because nothing so far indicates that Amazon will not hit their predicted target of moving 5 million units in their first two months (for comparison, 2011 iPad sales are usually estimated at 20-25 million). Amazon will have to follow this up with something even better next year, but if they do I’ll be surprised if by December next year, the top-selling tablet hardware isn’t called “Kindle” something.
Judging by that particular review - yes.
I bought a new smartphone a week ago and noticed the same thing in several review sites. Every middle tier phone is “meh” or “not bad” or just “kind of good”, because they are technophiles who prefer the highest tier, the iPhone 4S, the Galaxy S2, etc and even more, what is happening really is that they are not counting the price as a factor in their review, nor the price:quality ratio (which actually should be the most important factor!).
Doing a review of a $200 phone and a $600 phone without judging them at least in part for their price tag is very stupid, the same is happening with the tablet market. $200 is not $300, and much less $500.
Essentially what’s happened is a $200 device has been released and it is as good as the money put towards it. My actual bone to pick with this whole thing is why the Nook isn’t getting this love. It’s going to be $50 more sure, but you seem to be getting your moneys worth for sure there (especially if you plan to install Android 4.0).
Here’s a review that pretty much reflects my impressions:
http://ireaderreview.com/2011/11/17/kindle-fire-unfiltered-kindle-fire-first-impressions/
I liked the NY Times review. The machine I actually want is the Kindle Touch 3G. No tablet aspirations, just a fantastic e-reader with long battery life and always on access to content.
I’m pretty sure this part is right, at least:
It’s going to be a massacre – unless Apple releases Tablets in the $300 to $350 range soon (by mid 2012).
Who would have thought Android phones would be outselling iPhones 2 for 1 by the end of 2011 and hold >50% of the market last year? If Amazon makes the jump smoothly to ICS (which should provide a boost to KF performance), I see no reason why something similar won’t happen with tablets next year.
Hey what app is that? The built in mail client couldnt connect to Exchange and when I looked in the App store, all I saw were things that cost, except one app that was a 30 day trial of the $9.99 full priced product.
Enhanced Email, which was the free app of the day yesterday.
I wouldn’t think about getting one till they update it with ICS. I understand why they released it now but I feel they made a mistake doing it before ICS is on the thing.