From the beginning, Amazon's Kindle Fire was positioned as the budget tablet. Compared to the competition, rarely do the specs measure up. The one consistently redeeming virtue is the price. At $229 it retains some appeal despite its many drawbacks.
Now T'is the season for flashy flourishes and the Kindle Fire hasn't disappointed on that account. With a slightly redesigned operating system, based on Android, and a free Mayday feature - single button press access to a service rep - they're certainly going for the flash factor. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX hit the market on October 18 followed by the larger 8.9-inch screen version on November 7.
Hopes for dramatic improvements in the Kindle Fire's functions and capacity, though, will be sadly letdown. The improvements are minimal in the third-generation model. Actually, some might even think the situation worse than that. Though the system is based on the Google Android the new owners of the Kindle Fire find themselves lacking in all the great Google apps and services that the standard Android user enjoys.
In contrast, the purchase of the new Kindle Fire leaves one immediately faced with having to download desired apps from Amazon. (This annoyance has included, by the way, activating the Flash Player , which does come with, but not activated, to the chagrin of some.) As if the quality of the user experience wasn't hampered enough, the quantity adds additional limitations: something in the vicinity of 85,000 apps are available for the Kindle tablet compared to nearly a million for Android. And it's not just the sheer numbers, as many extremely popular ones are missing: e.g., Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
This brings us to another annoying feature of the Kindle Fire HDX, like its predecessor, its constantly trying to sell you goods from Amazon. If you hold your mouse over anything - app, book, video, whatever - your friendly Amazon salesman jumps up with a suggestion of something similar you should consider purchasing.
I find this immensely annoying and distracting. Obviously, it's a matter of personal taste. Some folks, I expect, find real value in this endless exposure to new product opportunities. For me, it just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do. Like commercial television, though, this is the monetizing strategy: you suffer through the ads to get the product at such a low price.
There is some good news for those determined to buy this product. They've succeeded at decreasing the general bugginess of early versions. That's not to say that there are not still too many glitches, but it is noticeably improved on that front. I like as well the "carousel" style display, which allows you to view apps, movies, books or anything else which the Kindle user has recently accessed. A navigation bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to browse conveniently through the content on the Kindle Fire.
Then there's that Mayday feature mentioned earlier. At the press of a button you get access to a live service rep, which appears in a corner of your screen. This rep can answer all your questions and actually take control of the tablet if that's a faster way to resolve difficulties than simply explaining how-to to the owner. This is a fairly cool thing and it is impressive that they've committed so heavily to customer service.
Yet, for all that, there's a kind of paradox, here. After all, one of the main selling features of these tablets is their intuitive qualities. They're supposed to be very high on the user friendliness scale. So all the effort and expense put into this live rep feature almost leaves me wondering if the poignant "Mayday" is meant less to evoke the user calling out to the rep than Amazon calling out Mayday to the market. They surrender: as in, okay, this is the best we can do, here's the workaround our inability to come up with a tablet that actually fulfilled the promise of intuitive function. Sorry. I know, I'm a cynical old dog.
So, look, we have to conclude the same thing we have concluded on past versions. If you're sole interest is an unfailing loyalty to Amazon and its products, Kindle Fire may well be just what you need -- and there's certainly major improvements this time around. On the other hand, if your primary motivation is to save money on a tablet, you can do better .
Now T'is the season for flashy flourishes and the Kindle Fire hasn't disappointed on that account. With a slightly redesigned operating system, based on Android, and a free Mayday feature - single button press access to a service rep - they're certainly going for the flash factor. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX hit the market on October 18 followed by the larger 8.9-inch screen version on November 7.
Hopes for dramatic improvements in the Kindle Fire's functions and capacity, though, will be sadly letdown. The improvements are minimal in the third-generation model. Actually, some might even think the situation worse than that. Though the system is based on the Google Android the new owners of the Kindle Fire find themselves lacking in all the great Google apps and services that the standard Android user enjoys.
In contrast, the purchase of the new Kindle Fire leaves one immediately faced with having to download desired apps from Amazon. (This annoyance has included, by the way, activating the Flash Player , which does come with, but not activated, to the chagrin of some.) As if the quality of the user experience wasn't hampered enough, the quantity adds additional limitations: something in the vicinity of 85,000 apps are available for the Kindle tablet compared to nearly a million for Android. And it's not just the sheer numbers, as many extremely popular ones are missing: e.g., Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
This brings us to another annoying feature of the Kindle Fire HDX, like its predecessor, its constantly trying to sell you goods from Amazon. If you hold your mouse over anything - app, book, video, whatever - your friendly Amazon salesman jumps up with a suggestion of something similar you should consider purchasing.
I find this immensely annoying and distracting. Obviously, it's a matter of personal taste. Some folks, I expect, find real value in this endless exposure to new product opportunities. For me, it just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do. Like commercial television, though, this is the monetizing strategy: you suffer through the ads to get the product at such a low price.
There is some good news for those determined to buy this product. They've succeeded at decreasing the general bugginess of early versions. That's not to say that there are not still too many glitches, but it is noticeably improved on that front. I like as well the "carousel" style display, which allows you to view apps, movies, books or anything else which the Kindle user has recently accessed. A navigation bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to browse conveniently through the content on the Kindle Fire.
Then there's that Mayday feature mentioned earlier. At the press of a button you get access to a live service rep, which appears in a corner of your screen. This rep can answer all your questions and actually take control of the tablet if that's a faster way to resolve difficulties than simply explaining how-to to the owner. This is a fairly cool thing and it is impressive that they've committed so heavily to customer service.
Yet, for all that, there's a kind of paradox, here. After all, one of the main selling features of these tablets is their intuitive qualities. They're supposed to be very high on the user friendliness scale. So all the effort and expense put into this live rep feature almost leaves me wondering if the poignant "Mayday" is meant less to evoke the user calling out to the rep than Amazon calling out Mayday to the market. They surrender: as in, okay, this is the best we can do, here's the workaround our inability to come up with a tablet that actually fulfilled the promise of intuitive function. Sorry. I know, I'm a cynical old dog.
So, look, we have to conclude the same thing we have concluded on past versions. If you're sole interest is an unfailing loyalty to Amazon and its products, Kindle Fire may well be just what you need -- and there's certainly major improvements this time around. On the other hand, if your primary motivation is to save money on a tablet, you can do better .
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To keep up on all the Kindle Fire updates, watch for Mishu Hull's valuable posts .
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