Wired reporting:
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.
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.
The Fire is a fiendishly effective shopping portal in the guise of a 7-inch slate.
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?
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.
http://www.wired.com/reviews/2011/11/kindle-fire/all/1
