If you are looking to buy ereaders today, the all-new Kindle Fire from Amazon might just fit the bill. As you would soon discover, this is no ordinary ereader. Although the original Kindle has been well-established as Amazon’s flagship ereader since 2007, the Kindle Fire that has just been released on November 15, 2011 in US stores is much more than that. For the first time, Amazon has actually released a full-fledged multimedia tablet, that is actually designed to compete in the tablet market itself, even against the likes of the Apple iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tabs. Let us now take a closer look to see how much new ‘fire’ is the Kindle Fire bringing beyond the basic ereader that we have become accustomed to.
At a price of only $199, this is currently the cheapest tablet out in the market, particularly among the 7-inchers. The 7-inch touchscreen is portable and comfortable to use single-handedly, as compared to the larger 9.7-inch iPad or 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab that typically requires both hands to use comfortably. Weighing 14.6 ounces and measuring just 11.4mm thin, this black tablet does seem to resemble the Blackberry Playbook which also has the same 7-inch size. Taking a close inspection on its externals, there is a 3.5mm headphone jack, a standard power button, a micro-USB port at the bottom, and a pair of stereo speakers on the top.
Now after turning the Kindle Fire on, we were greeted by a bright touchscreen with vibrant colors. Capable of displaying 16 million colors at a 1024 by 600 resolution, the Kindle Fire yields an image quality of 169ppi on its 7-inch screen, which actually is higher than that of the iPad 2, which sports 132ppi on its larger 9.7-inch screen. The Kindle Fire display is built with Corning’s Gorilla Glass, which is featured as being 20-30 times harder than plastic and is highly scratch-resistant. Featuring in-plane-switching (IPS) technology, the touchscreen was reasonably smooth and slick, being quite responsive to multi-touch gestures from swiping, rotating, to pinching while zooming, and overall the bright colors were appealing to look at.
The Kindle Fire runs a heavily modified version of the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, which is now the mainstream Android operating system on smartphones and most 7-inch tablets. Amazon has tweaked the interface to suit its unique interface, and one of the strongest key features that sets the Kindle Fire apart from the competition is the user-friendly and slick access to Amazon’s online stores. Leveraging on its massive volume of content that has only been growing since Amazon’s birth in 1995, the Kindle Fire provides users easy access to millions of e-books, music, magazines, over a 100,000 TV episodes and movies, and over 10,000 apps from the Amazon Appstore. The Amazon Appstore is actually a subset of the Android Marketplace which currently features over 230,000 apps that is growing by the day. Although the number of apps might seem disappointingly small initially, but in actual fact, Amazon is actually selective and picky in choosing only the best and most popular apps to be featured in its Appstore. So yes, you do get to play Angry Birds too among many other apps on the Kindle Fire besides reading all your popular e-books.
Although the Kindle Fire only provides you with 8GB of internal storage, Amazon more than compensates for this by providing unlimited access to its cloud storage for all content that is purchased on Amazon itself. This is a very powerful utilization of cloud storage, since users get to retrieve their purchased content anytime and anywhere, without the hassle of copying files locally from PCs to flash drives, for instance. For user content that doesn’t come from Amazon, there is an additional 5GB of storage provided for free, which is somewhat similar to Apple’s iCloud.
On top of being the standard capable ereader that the Kindle already is, the Kindle Fire provides a very pleasant internet browsing experience through its Amazon Silk browser, which is literally to be as ‘smooth as silk’. The Amazon cloud storage also syncs with the Amazon Silk browser, which is Amazon’s proprietary “split browser” technology. This “split-browsing” improves speed and performance by making use of the cloud storage to offload some of the main processing workload in rendering web pages through the browser. The Silk browser allows viewing web sites in both desktop and mobile versions, and comes with full support of Adobe Flash, email, as well as Office and PDF documents.
The Kindle Fire is literally an ereader on steroids, powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor and 512MB RAM, allowing it to keep up with its regular tablet competitors. It comes with Wi-Fi and USB connectivity, though at its price point, there are some key features missing such as 3G, Bluetooth, cameras, motion-sensors, GPS, and the option of connecting an external keyboard.
If you are on a tight budget to buy ereaders, the Kindle Fire is a great steal at its $199 price. While not designed to kill the iPad 2 in terms of brute power, this is one of the best value packages that you can get in a full-featured ereader cum tablet that also provides you convenient access to Amazon’s unbeaten volume of content online.
