1. Kindle Fire Tablet
The wraps are finally off Amazon’s Kindle Fire
tablet. Its splashy entry into the tablet firestorm was hard to miss–Amazon made quite a press
release with its $199 price–and yet I’m underwhelmed. Although reporters were not allowed to the
touch the Kindle Fire during the demonstrations following Amazon’s New York launch event, I
spent considerable time observing the tablet in action, and grilling Amazon executives about
different features. My gut reaction to what I saw today: This isn’t the Amazon tablet we’ve all been
looking for.
The rumor mill was rife with talk of an Amazon Android tablet for months. And no wonder:
Amazon is the only real company whose shopping services could create an integrated tablet
experience that offers Apple a run because of its money. What Amazon announced today when
using the Fire is a smaller amount of a ready-to-use tablet and mare like a targeted companion for
Amazon’s content and cloud services.
The Kindle Fire is
proscribed in several meaningful ways. For starters, it ships with just 8GB of memory. That isn’t a
lot of space for the sort of content I can easily envision consumers clamoring to use using the tablet.
Surprisingly I got multiple different answers from Amazon execs when I asked them how much
space a typical 2-hour movie takes up: The most intelligible of this answers suggested that up to
twenty movies could reside to the device directly, however the reply clearly shows that, since you
amass your digital media collection, you’ll have to make hard decisions about what you would like
to have on your Kindle Fire and if you should have it–not unlike the quandary over what should
stay in your DVR. Forget taking the whole five seasons of Babylon 5 with you wherever you go,
including carrying a number of video if your device can be packed with music. Yes, device media
management has the possibility to be quite tiresome over time–though just how tiresome is
impossible to say until we have working devices in our hands.
You may side load content of your special, but you’ll even have to shop for your personal apps to
play that content. The video player is solely for Amazon purchased or streamed content, and the
device has no image gallery for showcasing your favorite snaps.

2. Amazon Kindle Fire
First Impressions: Solid but Limited another limitation could be apps. The Kindle Fire uses a
variation of Android 2.3, with its own mostly unique interface; I say “mostly” because once in a
while, while in the Web browser or in messages that popped up, I saw hints on the Kindle Fire’s
Android roots. Apps for your device will come from your Amazon Appstore, but Amazon stocks a
fraction of the full number of Android apps available now–just 10,000 of the 200,000 in the
Android Market.
Still another issue beyond the comparatively limited app selection: Amazon again gave mixed
answers regarding compatibility between the Kindle Fire and also the greater universe of Android
apps. One spokesperson said that apps that involved features that aren’t for the tablet (just like a
camera) wouldn’t work; another said outright that the corporation can be curating apps; and still
another, when asked about app compatibility, mentioned that apps must be qualified to figure, and
that some may not work considering the Kindle Fire. Furthermore, when asked about the coming
Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and the way apps suitable for it or
Honeycomb work on the Kindle Fire, the Amazon rep couldn’t field a solution beyond noting that if
Ice Cream Sandwich requires Amazon to perform something to maintain compatibility, “we’ll do
our best” to do so.
As a potential buyer, I would have liked more reassurance that come mid-2012, the hot Android
apps will work on my Kindle Fire tablet, since the changes made towards operating system are
minimal enough that Amazon expects to be able to work around any situations which will arise.
Yes, I understand that Amazon hasn’t seen Ice Cream Sandwich yet, but the corporation’s
developers should concentrate on the direction the OS is heading in, and how which may impact
Amazon’s ecosystem.
Amazon Kindle Fire First Impressions: Solid but Limited also was surprised by Amazon’s lack of
emphasis on the quality from the reading experience on an LCD screen. I’ve seen the lengths to
which some tablet makers go in an effort to reduce glare (applying coatings, for instance, or closing
or eliminating the air gap between the glass and LCD), also to optimize the tablet for reading.
Again, I received mixed answers from Kindle Fire representatives when I asked this question. One
couldn’t point to anything particularly that this company had done; the other noted that Amazon had
optimized its fonts (though you would have fooled me, judging from the pixelated text I saw in
today’s demos). Maybe the Amazon Silk Web browser and Kindle fire book reader were still too
early to be fully optimized, but let’s just say that I was lower than encouraged by the text I saw. In
fact, I was startled to view how visible the touchscreen grid was at certain angles; some things we
just should not be able to notice.