PCWorld reviews Amazon’s tiny-screen Kindle Fire: Flawed, unimpressive, subpar; can’t hold a candle to iPad

15 years ago

“All eyes are on the Amazon Kindle Fire to provide fresh competition for Apple’s iPad 2, today’s dominant tablet,” Melissa J. Perenson reports for PCWorld. “Not so fast: Beneath the Kindle Fire’s slick veneer and unparalleled shopping integration lies a tablet that fails to impress as either a tablet or as an e-reader.”

“The Kindle Fire ($200 as of November 15, 2011) is best considered a relatively inexpensive, hassle-free but flawed way to consume books, music, and videos purchased at Amazon,” Perenson reports. “As a tablet, though, the Fire can’t hold a candle to the best tablets available today: It has subpar specs, a limited interface, and a surprisingly messy app store.”

“Amazon’s Appstore was disappointing, and my experience with apps as a whole weighed down my impression of the Kindle Fire as a tablet,” Perenson reports. “For one thing, most of the apps I downloaded ended up looking as if they were phone apps blown out to fit the big screen. This a problem for any Android 2.2 or 2.3 tablet, which is why we don’t recommend such tablets at this point… My random downloads produced apps with fuzzy, phone-ready graphics and menu design, and my searches revealed apps that won’t even work right on the Kindle Fire because it lacks the necessary hardware. Even Angry Birds wasn’t ready for prime time here — two versions of Angry Birds launched upside down, depending on how I held the tablet. Oops.”

MacDailyNews Take: Xoon.

Perenson reports, “My streaming and downloaded Amazon Instant Videos always looked soft, and often pixelated. Text was soft, too, in the Newsstand and in books at some font and text combinations… Even audio playback was wonky… For me, those trade-offs are simply not worthwhile, even to save a few bucks. What’s the point of being able to procure video easily, if my videos are going to be soft, have artifacts, and not sound great?”

MacDailyNews Take: There is no point. Luckily for Amazon, the world is packed with idiots.

“It lagged on transitions, even simple ones such as turning book pages or rotating orientation; it also produced jerky animations and repeatedly generated pixelated video playback,” Perenson reports. “In my trials, I became all too familiar with the spinning-ball wait indicator that appeared as something loaded, and I felt as if I paid with my time what I saved in money on the Fire’s modest price… The Fire falls far short of providing a full and satisfying tablet experience.”

Read more in the full review here.

MacDailyNews Take: Yet another lovely review for Amazon’s slab o’ crap.