The Kindle Fire Problem

[Chiropteran]

Amazon is doing it wrong.

I asked for and received a Kindle fire for Christmas last year. It was a nice little tablet for the price, and I'm personally a big fan of Amazon's video and music options, I feel like the prices are better than Google play or other alternatives and quality is good enough. My only complaints the entire time using it were a bit of UI lag and poor UI responsiveness, although apps ran fine once they loaded.

Now here we are, less than a year later, and Amazon is releasing new version of the Kindle Fire. Can't fault them for that, (approximately) yearly refresh cycle is not unusual. The new Kindle Fire has an updated UI, based on Android 4.0 Where I do fault Amazon is keeping that UI update from the original Kindle Fire. Why? Performance? I don't buy that as an excuse, as many people have installed 4.0 and even 4.1 on the Kindle Fire and it reportedly works great.

This is the important part: Amazon supposedly sells the Kindle Fire hardware at a loss, or at best barely breaking even. What kind of message are they trying to send? "Hey, buy more of our under-priced hardware every year, we like to lose money on it and we like to force you consumers to lose money too?"

The message I get is probably not the one Amazon intended to send. Given all of the above, plus the annoying pay-to-disable advertisements on the new Kindle Fire models, the message is loud and clear: buy this device and root it and put on your own OS. Of course, by doing that I won't be using the Amazon App-store, Amazon video, or other Amazon services. Good job Amazon, really saved a lot of money by skipping out on the OS update for your ancient 10 month old tablet.

Why is Amazon pushing me and other consumers in this direction? I'd love to keep using my old Kindle Fire, but it's just hampered so badly by it's old out of date OS. I can't justify buying a new piece of hardware knowing it's probably going to be left in the dust a mere 9 months later, with no OS updates or support.

 

[bonkers325]

you're part of a minority of KF users that care about the software running in the background. for most users, all they care about is:

can it read books? yes
can it play videos? yes
can it run apps? yes

it's a one-stop-shop for everything and anything amazon. they don't care what version of the OS is, as long as it runs without much of a hitch.

 

[Tom]

The old Kindle Fire still works as well as it ever has.

The new Kindle Fire HD is considerably more powerful you aren't going to make an old Kindle Fire into the new one by upgrading the UI.

 

[Ravynmagi]

I never tried the original Kindle, so I don't know how much of an improvement the new software update is on the Kindle Fire HD. But I agree, it seems very odd of Amazon to not update the previous generation Fires to the new software experience.

Maybe users don't care if they have Android 4.0 or Android 2.3 on their Fire. But I assume Amazon has made improvements to their OS that users would care about and want. And Amazon of all companies seem like they should want to keep users happy with the hardware they already have as long as possible since the profit really doesn't come from hardware sales.

 

[gorcorps]

You're thinking too hard. They aren't trying to send a message with their price, they're just trying to gain market share while hopefully making up for it in app and ebook sales. While it's a bit of a bummer it won't be updated any further, it's not exactly a surprise. If you're somebody who worries about software updates, the Nexus 7 is the tablet for you. You won't have to worry about software updates and can still use Amazon apps and reader. That may not be the answer you were looking for, but Amazon isn't exactly aiming at the high end consumer market who expects (or at least knows about) the latest Android releases.

And one question I have is, if you know people have 4.0 and 4.1 working on it and it "works great"... then why aren't you running it? You don't really have anything to lose right? If you already know you aren't getting the update then you aren't waiting for anything.

 

[Topweasel]

Kindle Fire and Nook Color and their replacements are not real android devices. Think of Android on these as not an OS/Software. Think of Android OS as Firmware. Its an enclosed system made for a specific functionality, that just happens to use Android as the framework.

 

[Chrono]

Like everybody else has said, the kindle is a shopping portal for amazon.com. I had a kindle fire hd for about 3 weeks... rooted it and everything and installed a launcher. It is a great little tablet for the $ and using amazon's ecosystem really does simplifies purchases etc. I only returned it because I have another tablet (asus transformer eeepad) and I just bought an htc one x for use with straight talk...

I just wished they shipped it with Jellybean and ironed out the slowness from their native applications... other than that it was good to use.

 

[Chiropteran]

The new Kindle Fire HD is considerably more powerful you aren't going to make an old Kindle Fire into the new one by upgrading the UI.

That is misleading. The new kindle fire has the exact same CPU as the old one, it is just clocked 20% higher. It also has twice as much ram. However, phones with worse specs run android 4.1 fine.

"Considerably more powerful" is an exaggeration.

Also, in my experience and based on many other user reports, it generally seems that with the same hardware performance is BETTER with Android 4.0 or 4.1 than it is with Android 2.3, so again I just don't buy that excuse.

 

[Tom]

That is misleading. The new kindle fire has the exact same CPU as the old one, it is just clocked 20% higher. It also has twice as much ram. However, phones with worse specs run android 4.1 fine.

With computers the percent difference doesn't usually tell the story. A cpu and the amount of memory is either enough for proper operation, or it isn't.

But that's not the point of my post.

The old Kindle still works as well as it ever did. It didn't stop working because there's a new version.

 

[Chiropteran]

And one question I have is, if you know people have 4.0 and 4.1 working on it and it "works great"... then why aren't you running it? You don't really have anything to lose right? If you already know you aren't getting the update then you aren't waiting for anything.

Well, that is the whole point. Amazon seems to be pushing me and others in this direction.

Doesn't it defeat the purpose of having a loss-leader hardware device designed to get people into your ecosystem... and then encourage those people to wipe off your customized OS and replace it with something else (that lacks your ecosystem tie-in apps)? Where is the logic?

 

[Topweasel]

Well, that is the whole point. Amazon seems to be pushing me and others in this direction.

Doesn't it defeat the purpose of having a loss-leader hardware device designed to get people into your ecosystem... and then encourage those people to wipe off your customized OS and replace it with something else (that lacks your ecosystem tie-in apps)? Where is the logic?

They don't encourage people to do that. That's what geeky people who like play around and possibly break their toys like to do.

What the KF is for is to get all the people that like the iPad but don't want to spend as much, or convince people who would by an iPad that, they can get something close for tons cheaper. All the while sandboxing it into their ecosystem, so they buy stuff from them. Android in this end is a free to use framework that allowed them pull it off.

 

[Chiropteran]

The old Kindle still works as well as it ever did. It didn't stop working because there's a new version.

Well, that is debatable. It never worked at it's full potential, because of it's poor out of date OS, from the start. Minor problems and bugs have always existed, and the assumption I was under was that eventually Amazon would release an update to improve things and fix them. After all, the device did get an update about a week after release. It was "working" upon release, Amazon didn't need to release that first update, but they did anyway. It fixed some very annoying issues, the carousel was incredibly slow prior to that update, for example.

Is it really completely out of place to expect at least a year of support and updates for a digital product such as this? What about the poor suckers who bought a Kindle Fire 3 months ago, is 4 months of support too much to ask?

Sure, Amazon is in the right here, not saying they are doing anything illegal or morally wrong. It just doesn't seem to fit their business goal, and it's just going to drive away potential customers, or divert them from using the Kindle Fire to buy Amazon services and products to instead re-flash the device and use it to buy Google products and services.

 

[Tom]

Well, that is the whole point. Amazon seems to be pushing me and others in this direction.

Doesn't it defeat the purpose of having a loss-leader hardware device designed to get people into your ecosystem... and then encourage those people to wipe off your customized OS and replace it with something else (that lacks your ecosystem tie-in apps)? Where is the logic?

They don't really lose money on the hardware, that's a myth imo. And I bet most people who buy Kindles also buy Prime. Which means they buy more stuff from Amazon because of the shipping being "free". It all works together.

I'm also pretty sure the % of people who hack their Kindle device is miniscule, even smaller the % who do so to avoid shopping at Amazon.

 

[Chiropteran]

They don't encourage people to do that. That's what geeky people who like play around and possibly break their toys like to do.

Geeky people who like to play and break toys will do it regardless. Then there are people, like me, who are happy to use the official OS as long as it's all working correctly and not actively doing things to annoy me. I wouldn't dream of rooting and messing with my Nexus 7, because it's already running the latest and greatest OS and everything works wonderful. However, I'm very tempted to do just that with my old Kindle fire, because it just isn't working to it's true potential, being shackled to an ancient (in computing terms) OS. If I bought one of the new Kindle Fire, while the OS would be newer and nicer, I'd be pushed to root and replace the Amazon OS due to the annoying advertisements.

That is what I mean about encouraging people. They are actively adding things (such as ads) to their OS which people don't like, which will push some people to root and replace that OS, where they wouldn't have otherwise.

 

[Tom]

Well, that is debatable. It never worked at it's full potential, because of it's poor out of date OS, from the start. Minor problems and bugs have always existed, and the assumption I was under was that eventually Amazon would release an update to improve things and fix them. After all, the device did get an update about a week after release. It was "working" upon release, Amazon didn't need to release that first update, but they did anyway. It fixed some very annoying issues, the carousel was incredibly slow prior to that update, for example.

Is it really completely out of place to expect at least a year of support and updates for a digital product such as this? What about the poor suckers who bought a Kindle Fire 3 months ago, is 4 months of support too much to ask?

Sure, Amazon is in the right here, not saying they are doing anything illegal or morally wrong. It just doesn't seem to fit their business goal, and it's just going to drive away potential customers, or divert them from using the Kindle Fire to buy Amazon services and products to instead re-flash the device and use it to buy Google products and services.

I agree they should provide bug fixes, but that's different than a new UI.

I tried out my brother's Kindle Fire last year. I thought it was too slow so I never bought one. He and his wife were happy with them though and still are. They aren't interested in the new ones.

That's the real world, most people are happy or even delighted with stuff that us tech-heads can't stop messing with.

 

[Topweasel]

That is what I mean about encouraging people. They are actively adding things (such as ads) to their OS which people don't like, which will push some people to root and replace that OS, where they wouldn't have otherwise.

Doubtful. People have been buying the advertising subsidized E-ink devices for awhile. People who look for ways around software restrictions isn't the target market for the device. People wanting the latest and greatest on this glorified tablet that they are selling as a Amazon media portal, isn't the people they want. They want you to see those advertisements and they want you in their sandbox. Once you want to leave their sandbox or stop their advertising, then they would rather you purchased a Nexus 7 and just hope you install the Kindle app.

 

[gus6464]

My OG Kindle Fire runs JB pretty damn well. If you don't want Amazon's ecosystem root it, install fire^3, TWRP, and a JB rom/kernel.