Tag Archives: Kindle Fire

Kinde Fire in the NYT

Posted on by at 6:11 am

Not a great set of initial reactions to the Kindle Fire as reported in The Times:

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. 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. 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.

“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.”

I would also add that once you enter your Amazon.com password to the device, you never have to enter it again for future purchases. This might sound great, but imagine if a child picked it up and began a purchase frenzy.

You can read Jakob Nielsen’s report here.

Disclosure: I am long AAPL.

Related articles

But other than that Mrs. Lincoln?

Posted on by at 9:32 am

Marco Arment, creator of the fabulous app Instapaper, offers a detailed review of the Kindle Fire. Does he like it? Not so much.

The Fire is an Android version, sort of, of the iPod Touch. It’s the first device available that’s inexpensive and offers Android in a somewhat reasonable package without a cellular contract.

But that’s just about all I can say for it. It’s a bad game player, a bad app platform, a bad web browser, a bad video player, and, most disappointingly, a bad Kindle.

If I didn’t need the Fire for Instapaper testing, I’d return it.

Kindle Fire reviews

Posted on by at 2:21 pm

The reviews of Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet/media device are starting to come in. Here is a sampling.

Engadget:

When stacked up against other popular tablets, the Fire can’t compete. Its performance is a occasionally sluggish, its interface often clunky, its storage too slight, its functionality a bit restricted and its 7-inch screen too limiting if you were hoping to convert all your paper magazine subscriptions into the digital ones. Other, bigger tablets do it better — usually at two or three times the cost.

So, the Kindle Fire is great value and perhaps the best, tightest integration of digital content acquisition into a mobile device that we’ve yet seen. Instead of having a standalone shopping app the entire tablet is a store — a 7-inch window sold at a cut-rate price through which users can look onto a sea of premium content. It isn’t a perfect experience, but if nothing else it’s a promising look into the future of retail commerce.

Jon Phillips, Wired:

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. And it doesn’t even match the iPad in web browsing, the one area in which its hardware should have sufficient performance to compete. But the press has definitely supercharged Amazon’s product launch with a level of hype and enthusiasm that would make Apple proud.

WIRED A great platform for casual video playback. A perfectly fine Android 2.3 app device. A price that pleads “buy me,” repeatedly, until you crack a big grin, and give in like a good-natured father buying trinkets for the kids at Wal-Mart.

TIRED Small screen size and insufficient processing power. Crap browser performance. Near useless as a magazine reader, and roundly trumped by superb e-ink Kindles as a book reader.

David Pogue:

Most problematic, though, the Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or “wait” indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.

Magazines are supposed to be among the best new features. Most offer two views. There is Page View, which shows the original magazine layout — but shrunken down too small to read, and zooming is limited. Then there is Text View: simple text on a white background. It’s great for reading, but of course now you’re missing the design and layout, which is half the joy of reading a magazine. And Text View sometimes loses words, cartoon captions and so on. …

The built-in Web browser is supposed to accelerate delivery of Web pages by handing off some of the processing tasks to Amazon’s own online computers. Furthermore, when you are on, say, the New York Times home page, Amazon tries to guess what link you will tap next, based on its popularity. It prefeeds your Kindle pieces of the page that would then appear, to save even more time.

In practice, it’s not clear what all of that gains you: nytimes.com takes 10 seconds to load, eBay.com takes 17 seconds, Amazon.com takes 8 seconds. The iPad took about half as long each time. On the other hand, the Fire can play Flash videos (if a little jerkily), which the iPad can’t….

The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish; if you’re used to an iPad or “real” Android tablet, its software gremlins will drive you nuts.

 Lance Ulanoff (Mashable):

This is a product I wanted to love. The Kindle Fire’s unveiling was so impressive. Jeff Bezos hitting all the right notes in true Jobsian fashion, telling the tale of a product vision so clear it made my eyes tear up. Instead, now I’m discovering it’s a somewhat flawed gadget — a product that literally does not always know which way is up.

Donald Bell (Cnet):

Amazon’s triumph isn’t just about making cheap hardware. The Kindle Fire is a product that stands on Amazon’s years of hard work building out its e-book and digital media offerings, its app store, and its Cloud storage and processing technologies. But as much as I like this tablet, the Kindle Fire isn’t getting our best rating or an Editors’ Choice. There’s no doubt that I would choose an iPad 2 over a Kindle Fire in a heartbeat. In fact, I’d take an original iPad over a Kindle Fire.

Andy Ihnatko (Chicago Sun Times):

The Fire is a marvelous device. And Apple and Amazon couldn’t have created a more complementary pair of tablets if they’d colluded on it. Want a tablet that does everything, and which does books exceptionally well? Buy an iPad. Want something more compact, and you’re not terribly interested in much more than content consumption? The Fire is aces. I feel as if every potential tablet consumer will recognize themselves in one of those two descriptions.

Disclosure: I am long AAPL.

Kindle Fire and privacy (updated)

Posted on by at 7:15 am

The software on the Kindle Fire includes a new web browser called Silk, designed by Amazon.  It is designed to use Amazon’s online computing resources to speed downloads for users. Sounds good.

However, this also means that every web page a Kindle Fire user accesses goes through Amazon computers.  This gives Amazon the ability to track (and analyze) the detailed browsing history of Fire users.

Another way the browser aims to speed things up is by predicting the future. Silk uses machine learning to predict browsing patterns and pre-load pages that the user is likely to request next. Just as Amazon can guess which books and other products you’ll be interested in, it can also figure out which pages you’re likely to navigate to on the Web.

“The browser observes aggregate user behavior across a large number of sites,” said Jon Jenkins, Silk’s director of software development. “For instance, we might notice that people who view the New York Times homepage, often go to the New York Times business page afterwards. Our browser is capable of detecting these aggregate user behavior patterns and actually requesting the next page you’re likely to need before you even know you need it.”

Consider carefully the privacy implications of a retailer accumulating such data.

Update: More from Chris Espinosa.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

And from Naked Security:

Fortunately Amazon will support an “off-cloud” mode for Silk. This lets users opt-out of the benefits of using EC2 while retaining the traditional privacy benefits of connecting directly to remote web sites.

While most of us roll our eyes when confronted with long privacy policies and pages of legalese, privacy risks lurk around every corner. If you buy a Fire device, think carefully as to whether your privacy is worth trading for a few milliseconds faster web surfing experience.