Review: Amazon Kindle Fire

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.

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, 1024x600 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?

Hardware, Schmardware – Let's Sell Some Content
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.

See also:
Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think
Kindle Touch ReviewAnd, yes, the Fire is pretty good bargain for anyone who's only comfortable with cautious toe-dipping in our presently murky (and expensive) tablet waters. At $200, the Fire crosses an impulse-buy threshold – albeit a steep one – that Apple's $500 entry-level iPad 2 can't even approach.

All these enticing features are topped off by a free one-month subscription to Amazon Prime, the company's premium membership service. Prime provides free two-day shipping on all physical deliveries, free access to some 13,000 streaming videos, and free access to Amazon's Kindle Owners Lending Library. This library lets you borrow e-books from a selection of more than 5,000 titles, including 100-plus current and former New York Times bestsellers – one e-book at a time, and one borrow per month, but with no pesky due dates.

In total, Prime alone would seem to justify a Kindle Fire purchase – if not for the fact that the service is open to all Amazon customers for just $79 a year. This means one month of free Amazon Prime access is just a $6.58 value-add for anyone who buys the Kindle Fire.

All of which leads us back to what the Fire can actually do as a day-in, day-out mobile workhorse. Is it tablet that people will grab again and again for web browsing, book and magazine reading, casual gaming, and more?

No. It's not that kind of tablet.

The User Interface: Let's Start Buying Stuff!

The Fire's home screen reskins the Android 2.3 user interface with a whimsical bookshelf metaphor. The uppermost bookshelf is home to the Fire's so-called Carousel, a zippy, animated view of recently accessed apps, e-books, videos, magazines, music tracks, and even web pages. Below that you'll find a series of smaller bookshelves to store your favorite pieces of content.

The overall home screen conceit is a design win. Similar to the "cover flow" view in various Apple music apps, the Carousel let's you scroll through colorful, animated thumbnails of a wide variety of content items, adding much-needed user-interface sass to a tablet market that can't seem to shake the "uniform icons on a static grid" metaphor.

Rife with icons for all sorts of media types, the Carousel also reminds us that, at its heart, the Kindle Fire is a media-consumption device. This point is further emphasized by seven simple menu items at the top of the home screen: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps and Web.

Seven simple menu items. The brevity of this navigation system is almost comforting. You need not stumble around for clues to divine the Kindle Fire's intentions. In seven simple words, you're told exactly what the tablet stands for: consuming – and ultimately buying – digital media.

The problem for Amazon, however, is that not all types of digital media sing on the Kindle Fire.

Concerned? Walk with me, then. Join me on a tour of the Fire's key menu items. We'll discover a wide spectrum of execution, ranging from triumphs to stumbles to out-right failures.

Newsstand: A Failed Attempt at Digital Downsizing
This is your virtual bookshelf for any digital magazine you've downloaded. It's also where you purchase single copies and subscriptions of some 400 different full-color periodicals – digitized versions of glossy print fare as celebrated as Newsweek and National Geographic, and as obscure as Russian Life and Philosophy Now. Amazon is making a big push to promote the Fire as a magazine-reading platform, an initiative underlined by a deal that delivers free, three-month subscriptions of 17 different Conde Nast magazines (including Wired) to Fire customers who act before March 1, 2012.

But there's a problem: The Fire doesn't offer a comfortable magazine reading experience.

Pixel for pixel, the tablet's 1024x600 display actually delivers quite nice image quality. Swaddled in ultra-protective Gorilla Glass, the display uses in-plane switching (IPS) technology to deliver a bright, appropriately saturated screen image with solid off-axis viewing (meaning you can still see what's on screen when looking at the display from an exaggerated angle).

Unfortunately, though, the screen isn't adequately proportioned for magazine content.

Most real-world print magazines boast a per-page trim size in the neighborhood of 8.5x11 inches, and this doesn't scale well to the Fire's 3.5x6-inch screen. As a result, magazine pages – even when oriented one-up in portrait mode – are rendered illegibly small.

Yes, you can pinch out to view bigger text, and you can tap a "Text View" button to squeeze the magazine content into a format that reveals only words and key images. But is this really magazine reading? No, it doesn't even approach that leisurely, "I'll graze at my own pace" experience.

Worse yet, the Fire's processor appears ill-prepared to quickly redraw visually intense digital magazine pages. Swiping from page to page occurs in disorienting stutter-steps, making any semblance of "reading" a chore.

It actually makes much more sense to read magazine content via the RSS feeds of the magazines' companion websites – because, yes, almost all monthly print content eventually ends up online.

Books: Nothing to LCD Here, Folks

Amazon has built its Kindle hardware brand on the elegant delivery of e-books. And with more than 1 million titles in its digital book store – including some 800,000 e-books that cost less than $10 – the Fire owner will never want for downloads.

Add in all those New York Times bestsellers you can borrow from the Kindle Owners Lending Library, and the Fire would seem to present a compelling story as an e-reader. After all, says Amazon, the Fire has the e-book capabilities of a cheaper Kindle, as well as video playback, casual gaming, web browsing, and so much more.

There's just one problem: Because cheaper Kindle models that feature e-ink screen technology are so much better suited to marathon reading sessions, I can't imagine ever using the Fire to, say, knock out 200-plus pages of George R.R. Martin on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

E-ink screens look pretty much like normal paper. They render grayscale images via reflected light, which is much kinder to the human eye than the glaring, rod-and-cone-frying projected light of back-lit LCD displays. We all have different tolerances, of course, but I just don't like reading long-form content on LCDs, and I can't imagine using the Fire as my primary e-reader.

E-ink is also much, much easier to read in direct sunlight. And e-ink screens consume very little battery power. And Amazon's e-ink Kindles (which we also reviewed) are markedly thin and light, and even come with free 3G data connectivity so you can download content with abandon when Wi-Fi is unavailable. The Fire, as we know, offers no 3G option.

The upshot is the Fire is not the Kindle version for someone who primarily wants to explore the wonders of e-books – well, at least not traditional e-books that focus on long-form prose.

With the introduction of the Fire and its vibrant color screen, Amazon has begun selling children's e-books, graphic novels and comic books (see the photo above). These titles come with Fire-specific features that let you zoom in on text in kids books, and simultaneously isolate and enlarge individual panels in graphic novels and comics.

It all sounds good in theory, but the Kindle's 7-inch screen is still too small for any semblance of an immersive reading experience – even if that reading experience mostly involves looking at pictures.

Video: The Fire's Very Best Feature

For every sin it commits as a reading device, the Fire atones with a good deed in video playback. The Fire's wide-aspect-ratio video content plays in a 7-inch window. While this window isn't 720p (and therefore not true HD), it still holds up well to the 720p windows of the 9.7-inch iPad (9 inches at 720p) and all those 10.1-inch Android 3.0 tablets (9.75 inches at 720p).

While I experienced various performance problems throughout much of my Kindle Fire testing (the most egregious examples are outlined when we get to the web browser), video playback was blissfully uneventful as far as framerate hiccups.

Likewise, in terms of video noise and compression artifacts, the quality of all the content I streamed and downloaded from Amazon's store was serviceable to good. It's not Blu-ray-caliber, of course, but we're talking about a 7-inch video window, so how good does it really need to be? The trade-off in video size and quality is fair considering the Fire's imminent portability. You can take this tablet almost anywhere, and enjoy a good flick.

Amazon has dug its hooks into sundry video content sources, and this is where the Fire shines brightest: For $200 you get a perfectly serviceable video player that can stream video from three key, big-name sources.

First, Amazon's own store offers more than 100,000 TV shows and movies, some 13,000 of which are available for free via one's Prime subscription. Moreover, an Amazon rep shared in an e-mail, "We've already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to license content for this program, and we're going to be adding a lot more content in the coming months."

Second, via a soon-to-be-released Netflix app, you'll be able to stream all the "watch instantly" TV and movie content that's made freely available via your Netflix membership. And, third, via the Hulu Plus app (also announced, but not yet released), you'll be able to stream thousands of TV episodes from big-name networks such as ABC, NBC, The CW, FOX, Comedy Central, and more.

It all adds up to fantastic wealth of video options – assuming the Netflix and Hulu Plus apps appear as promised.

While Apple doesn't provide hard numbers on how many movies and TV shows are available for purchase, rental and free streaming from iTunes, my own anecdotal survey indicates Amazon matches up well to iTunes for everything from blockbusters to indie cult favorites. I searched for more than 25 movies and TV shows ranging from obscure to de rigueur, and Amazon only fell short of iTunes one time: I was unable to locate Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear.

Just be aware of the Fire's storage limitations when buying video content. Total internal storage is only 8GB, and just 6GB of that is available for storing downloaded content. Yes, Fire owners are afforded unlimited Amazon Cloud storage for anything and everything they might buy via the Amazon store – that includes music, books, and, of course, video. But you can't access the cloud if you're not on Wi-Fi, as the Fire doesn't include 3G support.

Bottom line: Manage your video library carefully before you enter a Wi-Fi dead zone.

Apps: This Is an Android Tablet, After All

It may be skinned in a pretty wrapper, but the Fire is still an Android device, and therefore has the software underpinning to run practically all the apps earmarked for Google's mobile OS.

Well, that's true in theory, but not in practice, as this tablet relies exclusively on Amazon's Appstore For Android, which offers a vastly smaller (albeit qualified) subset of the 350,000-plus apps available in Android Market. According to Amazon, just "several thousand" Android apps will be available for download on the Fire when the tablet launches this week.

I wouldn't worry about the smaller library. Most Android apps are crapware, and Fire owners will probably be grateful that Amazon is minding quality control.

Regardless, Amazon is working diligently to prop up the Fire with a strong selection of high-profile apps and games, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, ESPN SportsCenter, Facebook, Pandora, Rhapsody, and every Angry Birds variant a bird-hucking fool could ever want. The most noteworthy app, however, is Amazon Shop.

Fire up Amazon Shop, and you'll be ushered to a 3.5x6-inch storefront that collapses Amazon's desktop shopping experience into a touch-control dream. A welcoming search field at the top of screen beckons you to window shop, and once you find an item of interest, you can quickly tap through Photos, Details and Reviews via a contextual menu.

Just mind where your fingers land if you've signed up for 1-click purchasing. If you're not careful, you'll soon find yourself underwater in credit-card debt like a real-world Nicki Grant (too soon for a Big Love reference?). Indeed, the Fire really is a dangerous weapon in the hands of the financially compromised.

As far as performance, all the apps I tested worked fine on Amazon's hardware – as well they should have, because not only have they been pre-approved by Amazon, they were also designed for Android smartphones, which (theoretically) boast less processing power.

Web: Is This Thing On?

Despite all claims from Amazon that its Silk browser technology would bring sublime web-surfing performance to the Fire's desktop, I found the tablet's overall web experience to be quite ratty.

Silk is designed to split the workload of all the processing and data-fetching intrinsic to web browsing – some of it is handled by the Fire itself, and some of it is executed in the cloud. As Amazon reports on its website, "With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and the [Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud] that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content."

Sounds great in theory, but throughout my five days of testing, I found that total web page load times took anywhere from 100 to 300 percent longer on the Fire relative to an iPad 2.

And, yes, I made every effort to mitigate testing variables. Machines were restarted, caches were cleared, unused browser tabs were killed, and more. I even tested both tablets just two feet away from my WiFi access point to reduce signal strength as a variable.

Besides poor load times, the Fire's browser lurches in fits and starts when swiping through already loaded web pages. And sometimes the browser doesn't react to touch gestures at all, requiring that oh-so-annoying second tap or swipe instead. Pinching in and out of magnified views is also a test of one's loyalty – this action looks like choppy stop-motion video on the Fire, whereas on the iPad 2, it's fluid and seamless.

The Fire's processor is a 1GHz dual-core chip, just like the iPad 2's. And just like the iPad 2, the Fire comes with 512MB of system memory. So clearly something is amiss in Amazon's tablet. It could be a shortcoming intrinsic to the core architecture of the Fire's chip. It could be a software optimization issue. Regardless, the Fire's web browsing experience is emotionally draining. It makes you work for your page view, and that's a user-experience fail.

What's worse, even when your web page has loaded, it's still too small to really appreciate on the 7-inch screen. Pretty much all text must be tapped into a magnified view, and that's a telling indicator of why so many people avoided 7-inch tablets the first time they were floated to the public last year: They suck for web browsing. And that's a problem because web browsing is a key tablet responsibility.

Besides the features I already described, the Fire also has main menu items for Music and Docs. Neither feature deserves much discussion.

Music hooks into Amazon's awesome, exhaustively well-stocked library of audio tracks and albums. You can buy music right on the Fire, and access it anywhere you like, care of Amazon's cloud storage. But is a 7-inch tablet a convenient portable music player? No, our smartphones and iPods own this function. Case closed.

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Kindle Touch ReviewAs for Docs, it's a simple container for image, text, and PDF files that you've uploaded to the documents section of your Kindle Library. Huzzah. More than anything, it seems like the user interface designers at Amazon wanted to fill a hole in the Fire's main menu, so they added Docs as a placeholder.

At the end of the day, the Fire must be judged by how well it executes in terms of its Newsstand, Books, Video, Apps and Web features. It does nothing very well, save video playback, running various Android apps, and making the business of Amazon shopping alarmingly fun and easy.

If you already have $200 in your high-tech hardware slush fund, and you're not willing to splurge one cent more, I suggest you wait longer before pulling the trigger on a tablet. Let that nest egg build. Let it grow interest. Wait for the Kindle Fire 2.

Or – yes, I'm going to go there – consider an iPad.

By the time iPad 3 comes out, Apple's cheapest iPad 2 will almost certainly be even cheaper. And this could very well be the tablet for you: 9.7 inches of uncompromised screen real estate, a processor that rips through web pages like a chainsaw, and an app and digital content ecosystem that's already commensurate to (if not better than; let's be serious) anything Amazon offers.

iPad killer? No, the Kindle Fire is not. And it doesn't even match the iPad in web browsing, the one area in which its hardware should have sufficient performance to compete. But the press has definitely supercharged Amazon's product launch with a level of hype and enthusiasm that would make Apple proud.

WIRED A great platform for casual video playback. A perfectly fine Android 2.3 app device. A price that pleads "buy me," repeatedly, until you crack a big grin, and give in like a good-natured father buying trinkets for the kids at Wal-Mart.

TIRED Small screen size and insufficient processing power. Crap browser performance. Near useless as a magazine reader, and roundly trumped by superb e-ink Kindles as a book reader.

Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired. Creative Commons licensed under BY-NC.

See Also:- Amazon's Fire Tablet Already Challenging the iPad for Hearts & Minds: Survey

• How the Kindle Fire Could Make 7-Inch Tablets Huge
• First Look: Up Close and Personal With Amazon's Kindle Fire
• Tablet Wars: Why Amazon Doesn't Scare Apple (and B&N Scares No One)
• Kindle Lending Library Takes a Chance With Borrowing Books
• Borrow a Book a Month With Kindle Owners' Lending Library
• Kindle Update Adds Read Position Sync, Cloud Storage