“The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users,” David Streitfeld reports for The New York Times. “The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.”
“A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load,” Streitfeld reports. “There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.”
“All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered ‘a disappointingly poor’ experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate,” Streitfeld reports. “‘I feel the Fire is going to be a failure,’ Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. ‘I can’t recommend buying it.'”
Streitfeld reports, “The retailer says the Kindle Fire is the most successful product it has ever introduced, a measure of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold… Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts have been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Junk.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Whit D.” for the heads up.]
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Hunk a junk!!
That it is a hunk of junk has been clear since the get-go. So many bad reviews and so many disappointed owners.
This article is quite significant, though. It is the New York Times, and it is on page 1 of the Business Section. Millions of people will read it. Not to mention, it was NOT written by David Pogue (oftentimes labelled as an Apple fan and a critic of anything non-Apple); this really, really scathing article comes from David Sstreitfeld (who writes about tech directly from San Francisco).
You get what you pay for.
It’s probably even decent for $200.
My local Office Max had a Fire on display – it has cheap written all over it. I call it the Yugo of tablet-like devices.
The thing that bothers me about the fire is that with Amazon’s “One Click” purchasing, anyone can make app purchases without any authorization.
See this article from Daring Fireball:
http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/Amazon-Kindle-Fire-lets-kids-rsg-3752604696.html
Pretty scary.
Interesting to note the inverse relationship between pre-sales expectation vs. post-sales experience on a CHEES chart comparing the Fire to the iPad: high expectation for the Fire met with disappointing experience vs. low expectation for the iPad met with satisfying experience.
Love those phony acronyms.
Of course the Kindle Fire buyers are unhappy… Their friends have iPads… They thought ( and really hoped) they could get the same experience on the cheap… It just doesn’t work that way.. But they have no one to blame but themselves.
A chunk of junk.
For sake of truth in advertising, the Kindle Fire should be renamed Kindle Backfire.
kindle back fire!!!
Anyone who buys Apple stuff knows this adage already, but it seems like Amazon customers are finding out the hard way.
Never buy the first generation of something new.
I got the first gen iPhone and iPad and I loved them both. I was totally satisfied, they did exact I what I hoped and more.
As the other commenter said, this isn’t usually true with Apple, but it’s true with most other companies — Microsoft, Nintendo, and now Amazon come to mind.
Face it: Amazon is letting people pay them $200 to beta test their product. I’ll bet you anything most of these problems are fixed or worked around in Fire 2.0. Meanwhile, sucks to be an early adopter.
——RM
So, you buy a cheap knockoff…
… and then complain that it’s, well, cheap?!?
I think Amazon’s business model with Kindle Fire is just wrong. It won’t work. They are They are assuming the thrifty customers who are buying these strip down Table’s will buy so much stuff from Amazon to make up for the hardware loss! But, does it make sense? If these customers are buying crap to save money, why are thy going to amass Amazon products the will offset the cost of the Kindle Fire? What if these customers do not buy all these assumed products?
1. The loss to the kindle fire will stick.
2. Amazon’s earning will be negative
3. Amazon’s PE will go to infinite and
4. Its stock will crash.
I think the Kindle Fire will bring Amazon’s demise. It is a bad business model built on lots of flawed assumptions.
iPad user: I paid $600 for my iPad
Kindle Fire user: Hahahaah I just paid $200 for mine sucker.
iPad user: but I can do all sorts of things with thousands of apps at my disposal
Kindle Fire user: Oh….
iPad user: and the screen movement is seamless and the wifi wonderful
Kindle Fire user: Oh….
iPad user: And I particularly like the parental controls and the privacy options.
Kindle Fire user: Oh….
iPad user: Do you know any other vowels?????
Now RIM will try imitate Apple by launching a new promotion: “steal one, get one free”
Is that Fan short for Fandroid?
Thought so.
Amazon better get the WebOS Kindle update ready, REAL SOON.
No external volume control? Those of us who, for over 20 years have begged Apple in vain to give us an off switch for the damned annoying start-up chime, will understand how frustrating that can be!
Wait till the idiots that bought into the Kindle accidentally fire up some porn. The will be scrambling to find that volume control. It will look like a funny comedy skit, except its real. LOL
To avoid the startup chime, just hold the mute button while powering up, or disable completely in settings. It’s been that way for a long time (forever?).
http://osxdaily.com/2010/01/28/how-to-stop-the-mac-startup-sound/
I haven’t found iOS to be buggy. It’s worked very well for me.
I’m beginning to think Amazon hardware is sh*t in general.
My mom called me to ask if she should get a Fire. I mentioned that the reviews were horrible, and that if she liked the idea, she should wait until Amazon comes out with the second version, when they would fix most of the shortcomings.
To illustrate, I reminder her how the clunky and awkward the original Kindle was, but how the later revision, which she owned, got most everything right.
That’s when I learned that she couldn’t turn her Kindle off. Any attempt to turn the thing off was just ignored. And, of course, she has nowhere to go for decent tech support.
So don’t let your friends and family buy Amazon’s sh*tty hardware. Tell them to get a 16GB wi-fi iPad.
——RM
1) At the next quarterly earnings, AMZN will report a measurable hit to the bottom line from selling 3-5 million Kindle Fires at a loss.
2) At the second quarterly earnings, AMZN will need to deceive its shareholders and not report the quarterly sequential drop in Kindle sales that it doesn’t report anyway.
I wonder if AMZN can keep its PE above 100 under these circumstances.
Not “disgruntled.” it’s “differently-gruntled.”
“Disgruntled” is an offensive term.
/hilariousness
Anyone who uses “cheap” as the major criterion for one of their central entertainment and/or business tools is plain stupid. No sympathy.