The Amazon Kindle Fire
December 13th, 2011
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we were the surprised recipient of an Amazon Kindle Fire—Amazon’s entry into the tablet market. After using it for a few weeks and reading some of the reviews, here are some comments:
The Kindle Fire is NOT an iPad. You won’t see all the features that you get in an iPad. But at something like 40 percent of the cost, this is to be expected.
The Kindle Fire is tightly integrated with the Amazon store. It doesn’t support the EPUB format, so forget about getting books through any venue other than Amazon. And even though it’s an Android device, you can’t purchase apps from the Android Market; instead, you have to use the Amazon App Store which contains a subset of the apps found elsewhere. (This is because the Kindle Fire, while based on Android, is not a fully-compatible Android device. So some apps won’t work on it.)
Storage space is limited, and you can’t attach an SD card to increase it. So storing videos or large music libraries on the device isn’t really an option. Most videos will need to be streamed.
All this being said, the Kindle Fire is a great device if you want an e-book reader with internet, multimedia, and apps. I’ve been having a ball with the Scrabble app. And while one reviewer thinks it will take over the entire low-end and middle of the tablet market, I think it may see some competition from the Nook Tablet.
One thing I really like is that the Denver Public Library has Kindle books that I can check out and read on my device. Way cool!
Link #1 (Review): http://online.wsj.com/…
Link #2 (Review): http://www.ubergizmo.com/…
Link #3 (Negative Stuff): http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Link #4 (Comparison to Nook Tablet): http://www.komando.com/…
Link #5 (Comparison to Nook Tablet): http://arstechnica.com/…
