Kindle Fire reviews

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It seems like ages since Amazon introduced us to the $199 Fire at a hectic New York City event, but in truth that was only about six weeks ago. Maybe our perception of time is warped because we’ve been hearing talk about this 7-inch Android tablet for months now. Maybe it’s because Amazon launching a tablet seemed like such a natural thing to do after Barnes & Noble paved the way with its Nook Color. Or, maybe it’s just because the gadget Amazon shipped looks nigh-identical to the 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook that we’ve had for, well, ages.

For whatever the reason, what Amazon has delivered is a device that is intimately familiar yet mysterious — a simple, minimalistic exterior design hiding a flashy, seemingly quite trick customization that’s sitting atop a decidedly ho-hum Android Gingerbread build. Our questions leading up to this review were many: How will it handle sideloading? Are the battery life and performance better than the PlayBook? Can a tablet that costs two hundred bucks stand a chance against those that cost two and three times as much? C’mon baby, click on through to find out.

Hardware

 

The Kindle Fire is not identical to the PlayBook on the outside, but it’s pretty damned close. Turn off the screens then put a little black tape over the BlackBerry logo on RIM’s slate and, at a glance, there’s almost nothing between them. The Fire is a simple, black thing with nothing in the way of styling pretenses. In fact, one could say it has nothing in the way of styling whatsoever.

Flip it over and you’ll see the word “kindle” subtly embossed across the back, only really visible if you hold the tablet at an angle in some light. Otherwise the matte, rubberized back absorbs too much and you can’t spot that one bit of styling indulgence the designers allowed themselves here. There’s an extremely subtle “Amazon” print below too and, beyond some scribbles from the FCC, that’s it.

Pretentious this isn’t, and neither is it a handful. Measured in inches it comes in at 7.5 x 4.7 x .47 (that’s 190 x 120 x 11.4mm), making it 0.4 inches shorter, 0.1 inches narrower and 0.07 inches thicker than the PlayBook. At 413g (14.6oz) it’s slightly lighter, too, but still far from a featherweight — it’s noticeably heavier than the 345g Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

This thing feels incredibly solid, as if Amazon simply put a chisel to a big piece of slate, gave it a good whack and then put the resulting slab into a Frustration-Free box.

But, for that extra heft you get an extra feeling of quality. Like the PlayBook, this thing feels incredibly solid, as if Amazon simply put a chisel to a big piece of slate, gave it a good whack and then put the resulting slab into a Frustration-Free box. The rubberized back may not look or feel particularly posh, but the entire assembly is reassuringly stout.

The slight step down in size here compared to the PlayBook comes at the expense of the bezels, which are slightly more trim on the Fire — at least on three sides. Held in portrait, the 7-inch, 1,024 x 600 IPS LCD is shifted ever so slightly toward the top. The slimmed-down black bars make no room for a front-facing camera and there are none to be found around back. So, while you won’t be buying one of these for its looks, neither does it care much about yours.

That non-removable, soft-touch back extends about two-thirds of the way up the edges of the device, the rest covered by shiny black plastic that flows up and around to the edge of the Gorilla Glass. Situated between those two layers are a pair of thin speakers that will send tinny, hollow audio out only on the right side when you’re holding this as you would watching a movie. Those with more than one ear will want to want to make use of some headphones, which are not included.

Bring your own and you’ll find their receptacle on the opposite side, where the 3.5mm audio output is located. That’s situated immediately next to a micro-USB port and a small power button. And that’s it. There’s just that one button to be found, meaning you’ll have to delve into the software whenever you want to adjust volume. There’s also no HDMI output for playing all of the great content Amazon throws your way and seemingly no ambient light sensor, as the tablet can’t auto-dim its screen.

Internals

If you’re the type who likes to load down your tablet before spending a few hours or days offline, you might find this single, tiny capacity a bit restrictive.

Things are similarly barren on the inside. It’s the same dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP processor that powers the PlayBook, but here it’s paired with only 512MB of RAM and a mere 8GB of storage, of which about six and a half will be available to you and your ever-growing multimedia collection. Ostensibly, you won’t need much since Amazon so thoughtfully lets you re-download anything you’ve bought any time you want, and is quite happy to stream all your music to you as well. But, if you’re the type who likes to load down your tablet before spending a few hours or days offline, you might find this single, tiny capacity a bit restrictive. It’s a shame Amazon doesn’t offer a $250 16GB version, and a $300 32GB option too.

If you are streaming content you’ll be doing it over WiFi, as there’s no 3G option yet. The tablet supports 802.11b/g/n on 2.4GHz and had no problem picking up and staying connected to wireless networks that weren’t necessarily offering up full signal strength, but we kind of wish there were a 5GHz option. Bluetooth might have been nice, too.

Display

Again, this is a 1024 x 600 IPS LCD panel that measures 7-inches from one corner all the way over to the opposite one. Those are the same specs as on the PlayBook and, as far as we can tell, this is the same panel. That’s a reasonably good thing, because while it won’t wow you at its maximum brightness, color reproduction is good and viewing angles are just as broad as you’d expect from an IPS panel.

What isn’t so impressive is the 169ppi pixel density. With more and more smartphones starting to offer 1280 x 800 resolutions in displays that are four and five inches we might have hoped for a bit more here. Suffice to say the LCD in the Fire is good — but it stops short of being great.

It’s also a very, very different experience if you’re coming from any of the company’s other Kindles. E Ink displays offer a lower resolution and significantly reduced color depth (from this LCD’s 16 million rainbow hues down to about 16 shades between black and white), but the Pearl display’s reflective nature means it’s just like reading paper and is very easy on the eyes. That is, of course, if you have enough light.

An LCD brings its own backlight to the party, meaning you can easily read the Fire in pitch blackness if you’re so inclined — just remember you’ll have to manually dial down the brightness before doing so.

Battery life

This is one area where the Fire can’t hope to compete against its Kindle predecessors that got the market suitably warmed up. Those readers, with their power-sipping processors and incredibly efficient E Ink screens, have longevity measured in months. We sadly have to resort to measuring in hours and minutes here, but we still have reasonably good news to report.

In our standard video rundown test the Fire managed seven hours and 42 minutes. That’s 12 minutes more than the seven and a half hours Amazon promises it can deliver when playing video, reaffirming our belief that there is truth in advertising. Sometimes.

That figure compares favorably to the roughly seven hours the PlayBook managed but comes in 27 minutes below the healthy eight hours and nine minutes eked out by the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

Performance

As mentioned above, the Fire gets by with the same silicon that powered the PlayBook: a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP chip, but here paired with only 512MB of RAM. Perhaps it’s the step down from the standard 1GB, or perhaps it’s the heavy-handed software overlay running atop Android, but the Fire never delivers smooth, seamless performance.

While Amazon’s own carousel of recently used items is slick and smooth, we had inconsistent results with APKs we sideloaded on here.

While Amazon’s own carousel of recently used items is slick and smooth, we had inconsistent results with APKs we sideloaded on here. Amazon’s own media players work well, but third party ones that offered better compatibility with file formats universally did not. That said, 2D games like the omnipresent Angry Birds ran without issue, and simple 3D games like Fruit Ninja had no problems either.

Given the Fire has no access to the Android Market many of our favorite benchmarks were unavailable to us. We were able to sideload Nenamark and Nenamark 2, but running the second caused the Fire to crash. Hard. After resetting the device (it takes just over 30 seconds to boot, for the record) we opted to stick with web-based benchmarks.

Of those, the Fire achieved a respectable average score of 2,440 on SunSpider 9.1. Given the mysteries of Amazon’s Silk browser, which offloads at least some of the rendering to the company’s servers in the cloud, we’re not 100 percent confident in that score — especially since browser performance itself didn’t wow us (more on that in a moment). But, as it’s meant as a test of client-side rendering, it should be fair.

Software

You wouldn’t know it, but the Fire is running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. That’s the phone-friendly version of the OS that hasn’t shown up in a top-tier tablet for quite some time. But don’t fret that too much as it’s been quite comprehensively buried here. So, let’s start with what’s been piled on.

 

Interface

Your first experience with the Fire will be with a beautiful lock screen showing close-up imagery of abstract things — heads on a typewriter, freshly sharpened pencils, well-used fountain pen nibs. Writers will feel inspired by these poignant pics but anyone who likes customizing their home screen won’t. There are no widgets to trigger here, just a thin arrow that you must drag left to get in. It’s situated too high, in the middle of the screen, making it a bit of a clumsy reach. Choose to lock your device with a numeric code and you’ll be stuck with the even more unfortunate Gingerbread number pad, which doesn’t scale well on a display this size.

Unlocked, you’re greeted with what Amazon calls the carousel. It’s an endless stack of icons representing whatever you’ve most recently done — apps you used, books you read, movies you viewed — it’s all here in a big pile. Drag your finger across and those icons flip aside much like Apple’s iconic Cover Flow and this is, ultimately, an easy way to get back to where you were — so long as wherever you were wasn’t that far away.

However, it quickly becomes a little too deep to be all that useful, especially if you’re hopping back and forth between books and movies (as we reviewers are wont to do). The solution is to pull anything you like out and pin it to your favorites, which start occupying the shelves below this main carousel. This makes for easier access, but we wish we could split the carousel itself into multiple shelves — separate stacks of icons for most recent books, most recent magazines, most recent movies, and so forth.

You have to be annoyingly precise to get your chosen thing to launch.

A bigger problem is the carousel being a bit too sensitive to touch. You swipe left or right through the carousel and then tap whatever you want to launch. But, if your finger moves even a pixel or two in any direction when tapping the chosen item won’t launch. The list will instead scroll just a bit and then pop back. You have to be annoyingly precise to get your chosen thing to launch.

Read more at http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/14/amazon-kindle-fire-review/

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