Today the wraps are finally off the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. Then, its splashy entry into the tablet firestorm was hard to miss. Amazon made quite a statement with its $199 price. The UK pricing and availability has yet to be announced.
Amazon succeeds with the Kindle Fire in several respects which the first and foremost is the price (in the US at least): at $199, the Kindle Fire falls into territory that will not make a huge dent in consumers’ pocketbooks, and it is almost, but not quite, an impulse buy. Another excellence is its on-board storefronts for Kindle books, Android apps and movies and TV shows are visually appealing.
Then, the device’s tight ties to the various storefronts, coupled with the company’s vast selection of movies, TV episodes, books, and music, set the Kindle Fire apart from the crowded pack of generic Android tablets, which can play content but have no direct hooks to stores (beyond the books and movie rentals in Google’s Market).
This Amazon Kindle Fire is limited in several meaningful ways. For starters, it ships with just 8GB of memory. That is also not a lot of space for the kind of content I can easily envision consumers clamoring to use with the tablet.
Surprisingly , when I bought, I got multiple different answers from Amazon execs when I asked them how much space a typical 2-hour movie takes up: The most intelligible of the answers suggested that up to 20 movies could reside on the device at once, but the reply clearly means that, as you amass your digital media collection, you will need to make hard decisions about what you want to have on your Kindle Fire and when you should have it – not unlike the quandary over what should stay on your Sky+ box.
Moreover, another limitation may be apps. The Amazon Kindle Fire uses a variation of Android 2.3, with its own mostly unique interface; I say “mostly” because every so often, in the Web browser or in messages that popped up, I saw hints of the Kindle Fire’s Android roots. Apps for this device will come from the Amazon Appstore, but Amazon stocks a fraction of the total number of Android apps available now – just 10,000 of the 200,000 in the Android Market.
One could not point to anything in particular that the company had done; the other noted that Amazon had optimized its fonts (though you could have fooled me, judging from the pixelated text I saw in today’s demos). Perhaps the Amazon Silk Web browser and Kindle book reader were still too early to be fully optimized, but let’s just say that I was less than encouraged by the text I saw. In fact, I was startled to see how visible the touchscreen grid was at certain angles; some things we just should not be able to notice.
Furthermore, Amazon made a point of noting that the Kindle Fire carries a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels, with 169 pixels per inch. Well that is not so terrific that they earn any bragging rights, however. Although the interface seemed visually appealing overall, the music player looked surprisingly rough. When playing a track, the interface appeared to pay some attention to detail, but I cannot say the same about the album and track listings, for example.
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