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Kindle Fire reviews now coming in.

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Amazon was able to cancel mine, after reading the reviews, it's missing just a few too many features, and I suspect the nook tablet will be the hacker's favorite device.

Although the nook tablet is $270+ with tax 🙁
 
Pliablemoose said:
Amazon was able to cancel mine, after reading the reviews, it's missing just a few too many features, and I suspect the nook tablet will be the hacker's favorite device.

Although the nook tablet is $270+ with tax 🙁
Click to expand...

As I've said elsewhere...I don't want the hacker's favorite tablet. After having the hacker's favorite phone (HTC HD2) and flashing multiple ROMs a day for a few months, I'm just burned out on that scene. I want a tablet that works well out of the box, and I have a feeling that the Fire will best the Nook on that one.
 
gar655 said:
8gb, well actually 6, no option for more, no option for an easy dual boot, no 3g/4g (so much for consuming data from the cloud on the go) = FAIL compared to the Nook Tablet or even the Nook Color.
Click to expand...

So with the Ipad2 you can have 16gb (I am not sure what the actual amount is available, ) no option for more and well all for only more than 3x the price of the Fire. How is the Fire FAIL? What is fail is people's expectations of what it is supposed to be. I still don't get what is so hard to understand about using the cloud with wifi. How often are you not by wifi these days? If you go for long periods without wifi, then clearly it is not for you. Even then, you could always...connect with your phone's wifi if you were so inclined. It's not really all that complicated. Most people have wifi at home, office, in public, at airports, hotels...everywhere. Clearly you expect a little too much for a $199 piece of equipment.

FYI, the reason I still haven't bought an IPAD is because I never felt that is actually did enough to validate it's pricepoint...especially when I could buy very nice laptop in that range. It's all relative.
 
BigDaddyD said:
So with the Ipad2 you can have 16gb (I am not sure what the actual amount is available, ) no option for more and well all for only more than 3x the price of the Fire. How is the Fire FAIL? What is fail is people's expectations of what it is supposed to be. I still don't get what is so hard to understand about using the cloud with wifi. How often are you not by wifi these days? If you go for long periods without wifi, then clearly it is not for you. Even then, you could always...connect with your phone's wifi if you were so inclined. It's not really all that complicated. Most people have wifi at home, office, in public, at airports, hotels...everywhere. Clearly you expect a little too much for a $199 piece of equipment.

FYI, the reason I still haven't bought an IPAD is because I never felt that is actually did enough to validate it's pricepoint...especially when I could buy very nice laptop in that range. It's all relative.
Click to expand...

Yea, Amazon is also strongly linked with the cloud. The default music player on the Fire is the Amazon player, which links with your cloud drive account. You can stream video from Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. Kindle books are automatically stored online. Sure...sometimes you don't have wifi access, but on the whole, I don't see the storage as being that much of a problem. I don't think I've used more than 500MB on my PlayBook in the 6 months I've had it.
 
Deeko said:
As I've said elsewhere...I don't want the hacker's favorite tablet. After having the hacker's favorite phone (HTC HD2) and flashing multiple ROMs a day for a few months, I'm just burned out on that scene. I want a tablet that works well out of the box, and I have a feeling that the Fire will best the Nook on that one.
Click to expand...

Yep, I hear you, will just wait, and let the market settle down a bit. I suspect there will be refurb nook tablets and Fires in about 2-3 months, will re-evaluate then.
 
Deeko said:
As I've said elsewhere...I don't want the hacker's favorite tablet. After having the hacker's favorite phone (HTC HD2) and flashing multiple ROMs a day for a few months, I'm just burned out on that scene. I want a tablet that works well out of the box, and I have a feeling that the Fire will best the Nook on that one.
Click to expand...

When then honestly thats the iPad 2. If you dont wanna dick around with customizing and need the best stock experience, get an iPhone 4, iPad 2, and start buying apps. Assuming you stick with iOS you'll get your money worth over the years.
I dont even use my Droid as a phone any more but the ability to install CM7 combined with the free app a day from Amazon (of which I now have over a hundred) is just too cool to pass up. But it requires lots of work on my end.
Basically free though, aside from electricity required to charge the phone, which is minor compared to energy needed for my monitor and quad core system and nothing compared to my laser printer.
 
shortylickens said:
When then honestly thats the iPad 2. If you dont wanna dick around with customizing and need the best stock experience, get an iPhone 4, iPad 2, and start buying apps. Assuming you stick with iOS you'll get your money worth over the years.
I dont even use my Droid as a phone any more but the ability to install CM7 combined with the free app a day from Amazon (of which I now have over a hundred) is just too cool to pass up. But it requires lots of work on my end.
Basically free though, aside from electricity required to charge the phone, which is minor compared to energy needed for my monitor and quad core system and nothing compared to my laser printer.
Click to expand...

I'm not comparing it to $500-$800 tablets, that's foolish and I don't understand why so many reviewers are trying to do so. Direct competition for the Kindle Fire is the Nook tablet and other sub $300 tablets (of which there aren't a lot). Compared to the Nook, Touchpad, PlayBook, and various random budget Android tablets, I would say the Fire is the most complete, solid product out of the box.

Price point aside, I would still take the Fire over the iPad because I don't want a 10" tablet. I take my tablet with me. An iPad is not going to fit in my jacket pocket.
 
randomlinh said:
i'm curious to try this in the store. I cancelled my pre-order realizing why I wanted it would take a while (I want CM on there). I'm a little irked that even volume buttons were cut out. I like my one touch access to that.
Click to expand...

No volume buttons is really really stupid for a media consumption device.
 
I'm waiting for the new Nook. 8GB of storage and no SD was making me think "I could probably live with that..." But I wasn't considering that 8GB would effectively be 5GB.

That's just not a reasonable storage amount for a tablet. I know I'd be constantly shuffling things around on it, which just wouldn't serve the purpose.
 
Deeko said:
Compared to the Nook, Touchpad, PlayBook, and various random budget Android tablets, I would say the Fire is the most complete, solid product out of the box.
Click to expand...

Are you looking at developing for the Fire? Does the Fire's existence make Android as a whole more appealing to you as a developer?
 
poofyhairguy said:
Are you looking at developing for the Fire? Does the Fire's existence make Android as a whole more appealing to you as a developer?
Click to expand...

I'm considering it, yes. Its going to have mass appeal, and the Amazon app store is a lot less cluttered than the Android Market, so its easier to get noticed. I've been contemplating porting some stuff to Android for awhile now, and the Fire might push me over the edge.
 
Deeko said:
So I just watched the Engadget video of the browser performance - and anyone that refers to the zooming/panning experience as "ghastly" is obviously not very experienced with Gingerbread. I've posted this before, but this is an example of "ghastly" performance from Gingerbread: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pny3oZvGltE
Click to expand...
LOL, now that is ghastly++. If I owned that phone on the far right I'd stamp it until it was a hundred pieces.

The truth is I don't want to spend even $200 on a tablet right now, but if I had $200 there are only three things that would prevent me from getting the Fire at this point:
1) I want video out. I'd be willing to pay more for it. It's a shame this thing can play video but not send to the TV
2) Browser HAS to be fast. This one is non-negotiable. And fast means better than what I saw at engadget. Even if pages take a moment more to load, they have to be able to scroll and pinch instantly, like a good tablet (ipad or not) can do.
3) 1024X600 resolution is very frustrating to use. 1024X768 doesn't sound like much but it's the difference between pages working out of the box and having to play around zooming in and out or doing weird squeeze to fit stuff.

I don't care about a camera or capacity.
 
Mines out for delivery. And since its Overnight it will likely arrive in the morning. Possibly before I can even get my math homework done.
Maybe I should jump on that so I have the whole day to play around with my new toy.
 
Mine shows out for delivery as well. I guess Amazon didn't want me to cancel Amazon Prime. Now I'm stuck with Prime for a year.
 
Deeko said:
I'm considering it, yes. Its going to have mass appeal, and the Amazon app store is a lot less cluttered than the Android Market, so its easier to get noticed. I've been contemplating porting some stuff to Android for awhile now, and the Fire might push me over the edge.
Click to expand...

I think the Fire will be insanely popular.

Since they used the PlayBook reference specs, I wonder if they'll use the TouchPad reference specs/manufacturer for a 10" Fire 😀
 
Deeko said:
As I've said elsewhere...I don't want the hacker's favorite tablet. After having the hacker's favorite phone (HTC HD2) and flashing multiple ROMs a day for a few months, I'm just burned out on that scene. I want a tablet that works well out of the box, and I have a feeling that the Fire will best the Nook on that one.
Click to expand...

I felt the same when I had my HTC Touch Diamond. I recently jailbroke my iPhone4 and it brought back familiar memories. Now that I'm completely stock, I don't think I'll be doing any rooting/jailbreaking for a long time. It was cool to have special features, but it was annoying when certain things didn't work for some reason.
 
Pliablemoose said:
Amazon was able to cancel mine, after reading the reviews, it's missing just a few too many features, and I suspect the nook tablet will be the hacker's favorite device.

Although the nook tablet is $270+ with tax 🙁
Click to expand...

Yeah - I'd like a 7" iPad. Engadget said the Fire screen was similar to the Blackberry Playbook's screen, the touch interface wasn't super, etc. etc. I don't know if Apple will ever do it, but it'd sure be a nice form factor...
 
OK, its very pretty. Looks like a shrunk Playbook. Black soft touch plastic on the back. Minimal junk on the edges. One button, one plug. Thin little stereo speakers on top, but that means while watching movies in landscape you wont get proper stereo.

As soon as you turn it on it already has your Amazon account logged in (assuming you bought it for yourself). Asks for wifi access and immediately downloads a small update, and restarts.

Screen is gorgeous especially with brightness turned up. Speakers are OK, but for long term listening I'll need headphones. Already did a couple short videos. When you open the Amazon app it displays name and address, so I'll need to delete that. Wish I knew how to use Windows Movie Maker.
My camera is an older Sony and it requires the use of a dock to transfer movies. This may take a bit.

Their interface is similar to iOS in that its all set up to make you wanna buy more stuff from their site. Cloud music playing worked fine, also easy to download to device. But with 6GB free memory and no SD slot, I dont see myself doing that. You can preview stuff in the music and video store. Buying regular junk was easy, the app here is much nicer than their android phone app.

Oh crap, I dont have the movie maker in Win7 Pro. CRAP!

OK, this may be text only, cuz I cant straight upload to Youtube. I need to clip off a few seconds with some personal info and also run them all together.
 
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Does the Amazon market seem unmolested? (aka is it like on our phones)

How smooth in the interface in your opinion?

Will it let you sideload apps?
 
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