“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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