(cue Prodigy. Or maybe The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.)
So it’s out. The Kindle Fire is, if not in the hands of everyone, at least in the hands of the Usual Suspects – Mossberg, Pogue, Wired, Engadget, Gizmodo, the new kids like Wirecutter and the Verge. And the sense, overwhelmingly is…that it’s not an iPad killer. Not even close. In fact, more than once commenter has said that the #1 feature of the Fire is that it’s only $199.
Take a step back. The Kindle Fire is a 7″ Android tablet, something that already exists (Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has a 7″ form factor, and there are plenty of similar things available from your local cellular company). The thing that Amazon has done is to try to take the best features of the iPad and bring them in on a device half the price. To do so, they’ve had to be more like Apple than any other Android tablet – they have their own UI, their own App Store, their own provider of media content, and yes, they’ve removed some of the settings and features you’d normally find in an implementation of Android 2.3.
In fairness, this was probably the right move. Android 2.3 is about a year old (which is doddering senility in Android years) and sufficiently patched and robust enough to plop a new UI on, for Amazon’s purposes. And that’s where things really take a turn. Because the Fire, upon further review, is everything the iPad was accused of being: namely, a device purely for consumption of content.
Think about it. Not much you can do for communication or work: there’s no Bluetooth (and thus no hardware keyboard option), no calendar or contact app, certainly no cameras for video chat. No 3G or GPS and thus no mapping. Not even a notepad app. And while I’m sure some of these things will be added in software, the out-of-box purpose is clear: you use this to buy things from Amazon and read/watch/listen to them. Everyone is commenting on the “Android lag,” which I would have hoped would be reduced with a forked version of the OS; Amazon may not have done as much customization and optimization as I would hope for.
There are some odd choices, make no mistake. The lack of a physical home button is a design choice that may be tricky for some; the lack of physical volume buttons even more so. And with only 8 GB of onboard storage, and no expansion, watching movies will almost have to be a streaming-over-WiFi experience (the HD version of Iron Man 2, by comparison, is 4 GB when downloaded from the iTunes Music Store). In every way imaginable, this is a 1.0 product in a way the iPad had the luxury of not being, thanks to the existing iOS infrastructure.
At this point, it’s not for me – and I say this mainly because I got the third-generation Kindle for Christmas last year. Needless to say it’s not going to let me watch movies – but it’s better for viewing text than any LCD tablet out there, and the browser is plenty sufficient for Google Reader and Twitter in their mobile forms. Add to that the unlimited 3G connection and the ridiculously long battery life, and what you have is a device that perfectly complements the iPhone – because even thought it supports Kindle, Nook and its own iBook apps, using the iPhone to read books is an exercise in eternal swiping and backlight-driven battery drain. Charge up the Kindle, stick a few hours’ worth of podcasts and music on it (not too much, given the limited playback controls) and you can arrive from your flight with your phone still almost fully juiced.
In all likelihood, then, no Fire for me. But I’m going to keep an eye on the next one.
Meanwhile, I’m caving to the paste-eater way and mulling over what I want from the iPad 3 which I intend to see next spring. Of which more later.