“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,” Jon Phillips reports for Wired. “The Fire’s 7-inch, 1024×600 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.”
“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,” Phillips reports. “The problem for Amazon, however, is that not all types of digital media sing on the Kindle Fire… The Fire doesn’t offer a comfortable magazine reading experience… The screen isn’t adequately proportioned for magazine content. Most real-world print magazines boast a per-page trim size in the neighborhood of 8.5×11 inches, and this doesn’t scale well to the Fire’s 3.5×6-inch screen. As a result, magazine pages — even when oriented one-up in portrait mode — are rendered illegibly small… 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.”
MacDailyNews Take: Amazon is peddling a device focused on reading that makes reading a chore. For the Fandroids, we repeat: Amazon is peddling a device focused on reading that makes reading a chore.
Phillips reports, “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… 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.”
“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,” Phillips reports. “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… 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.”
MacDailyNews Take: Ouch. 🙂
Phillips reports, “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.”
There’s tons more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: Well now, there’s a lovely review: “Consider an Apple iPad instead.”
One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a 7-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45% as large.
If you take an iPad an hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these 7-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the ipad’s display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion. While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.
Apple has done extensive user testing on tough interfaces over many years and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps… The 7-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.
These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA. Dead On Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphaned product.
Sounds like lots of fun ahead. – Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
NY Times’ Pogue reviews Amazon’s tiny-screen Kindle Fire: Sluggish, ornery, unpolished – November 14, 2011
The Verge reviews Amazon’s tiny-screen Kindle Fire: Uninspired, confusing, incredibly unoriginal – November 14, 2011
Engadget reviews Amazon’s tiny-screen Kindle Fire: Sluggish, clunky, too limiting and restricted – November 14, 2011
PC Magazine reviews Apple iOS 5: The best phone and tablet OS, Editors’ Choice – October 15, 2011
The Guardian reviews Apple iPad 2: Ahead of the pack – March 25, 2011
The Telegraph reviews Apple iPad 2: Does everything better; now’s the perfect time to join the iPad club – March 25, 2011
Computerworld reviews Apple’s iPad 2: ‘The Holy Grail of computing’ – March 16, 2011
Ars Technica reviews Apple iPad 2: Big performance gains in a slimmer package
Associated Press reviews Apple iPad 2: Apple pulls further ahead – March 10, 2011
PC Mag reviews Apple iPad 2: The tablet to get; Editors’ Choice – March 10, 2011
Associated Press reviews Apple iPad 2: Apple pulls further ahead – March 10, 2011
PC Mag reviews Apple iPad 2: The tablet to get; Editors’ Choice – March 10, 2011
Pogue reviews Apple iPad 2: Thinner, lighter, and faster transforms the experience – March 10, 2011
Baig reviews Apple iPad 2: Second to none – March 10, 2011
Well, well. There _might_ be a favorable review out there somewhere. Anyone found one yet? Amongst the usual suspects, perhaps?
I have the feeling Amazon’s fingers will be burnt by the Fire. Amazon is playing with Fire by trying to play dirty with prices against the iPads. The Fire will burn through Amazon’s margins and will cause Jeff Bozos a bundle of hurts.
Hey, I found one- Killian Bell’s. He’s impressed with the web browser on the thing.
So, if you live in the USA, want to stream movies and TV shows at $2 to $4 a pop, buy and play music and send the odd e-mail over WiFi, $200 for a Fire is still too much.
Hint, it will cost a lot less in Feb. / Mar.
“The Fire isn’t a dud”
After reading this review the Fire pretty much defines the word “dud”.
Strange…”The Fire isn’t a dud…it’s just exceedingly slow, illegible, insufficient, annoying, and emotionally draining…”
Since we know that the tablet market can’t hold a candle to the iPad market, sounds like this Fire is little more than an ember (already used up and burned out).
Although the reviews are mostly negative, I recall the same type of review about the original iPad. It was relegated to failure too but it succeeded beyond Apple’s expectations. I only hope people don’t get stung on this tablet.
” … same type of review about the original iPad.”?
Really? … Link?
You must have fallen for a bullshit hit piece that had no basis in reality. Did you come to the realization that you are a blogger’s fantasy patsy target audience yet?
You’ve gotten your history a little wrong. The iPad didn’t get negative reviews. It got negative press when it was first announced, before anyone used it. Once people used it, the iPad got amazing reviews.
The Fire is just the opposite. Everyone was over the moon for the Fire before it was even released but now people are reviewing it and they realize it’s shit.
The Press is funny that way. They hate Apple so anything that might be seen as an iDevice killer they love on principle alone.
Just the opposite. Exactly.
Brilliant spot-on comment.
PC Mag calls it revolutionary, but what do they know. They’ve only been known to list Macs as their Editor’s Choice after all.
Yeah, like someone just said, wait till February. Get one for 100 bucks. (Heck, maybe even two!)
The fire has been roasted. Move along now.
Kindle Fire? Rub two together. The Amazon returns department is going to be very busy. Wonder if they’ll release that stat. LOL.
We all know that the Kindle Fire is no iPad, but any reviewer who faults the Kindle for not having a camera is an idiot, pure and simple. It’s a book and magazine reader, for Chrissakes!
In that case, there are cheaper book readers and it’s a shitty magazine reader.
Nice way to avoid acknowledging that the review said it’s a reeeeeally bad book and magazine reader…
iMessage is the sleeper feature in iOS 5 – BBM for all of apple’s portable devices. And now that iCloud is out, I can’t wait to cloud my CDs that I’ve been missing.
Kindle fire is a dinosaur. DOA. As a tweener device it really has to compete with the $200 iPhone 4S and the $500 iPad.
I’d get the iPhone 4S for $200 over the kindle fire any day.
So WHY was the Fire ever called a ‘competitor’ with the iPad? Don’t ask me!
Makes reading a “chore,” web browsing is “emotionally draining.” Along with the other reviews, this is NOT a good start.
What Kindle Fire needs to be is today’s Palm Pilot (or “U.S. Robotics Pilot 5000” when released). Compared to Apple’s Newton MessagePad, the Pilot was not as powerful and more limited in built-in functionality. But it was less expensive, smaller and lighter (important for a “PDA”), ran forever on a set of batteries, and provided a great user experience. It met and exceeded what the customer expected. And it was very successful. I had one (it was actually a Handspring Visor), and I “loved it” like an Apple product.
Kindle Fire should be that type of simplified and less costly device. “Limited” compared to iPad does not necessarily have to be bad, if the user experience is good and meets user expectations for a $200 device. If it’s LESS functional, it should be EASIER to make it snappy and glitch free.
But if it’s an emotionally draining chore to use, then customers who buy it are going to return it, no matter how low the price. And now that they have this idea in their head about using a tablet computer, a lot of them will suck it up and pay $500 for an iPad. Unfortunately, some will use the bad experience as a reason NOT to get an iPad.
When a product gets to the level of painful to use, you will stop using it. It doesn’t matter how low the price is, don’t waste your money on Fire. Would you buy a tablet at very low price , lets say for $100 if each webpage download on the tablet takes 25 seconds.
I won a Fire in a contest. It was so bad I gave it to a friend. A week later he gave it back to me laughing and said “Thanks, but no thanks, that thing sucks.”
Well, suckage is relative. It’s a Kindle. That means it is designed to be an eBook reader. Ask much more of it, despite Amazon’s blatant HYPE, and it’s a one-legged dog. It’s cheap in price because:
(A) Amazon subsidize it.
(B) It’s cheap hardware and software.
IOW: All the Kindle Fire hype from TechTard journalists is embarrassingly laughable. All the insistence that Apple enter the 7″ tablet market in order to compete with the Kindle Fire is embarrassingly laughable. That just about sums it up.
Pies poor tablet. Got if for free – they shiuld have paid me. Note to other socalled tablet makers- do opposite this piece of crape if you want to succeed