In the last 2-3 years, tablet devices have made a dent in the once traditional laptop and PC markets. Of course, the Ipad is the clear favorite among most hipsters but we decided to take a look at another device that has been gaining lots of momentum and that’s the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Highs:
-Great price
-Solid build quality
-Easy access to lots of media
-One free book a month
Lows:
-Occasionally clumsy interface
-Low internal storage capacity
-No 3G or bluetooth
-Marginal battery life
The Kindle Fire is the first tablet device by Amazon to be in colour. It’s 7.5 x 4.7 x .47 inches in size and only features a power button and audio output for headphones on the side. This means that any tinkering will need to be done through the tablet’s software functions. Inside, you’ll find a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP processor paired with 512MB of RAM and a mere 8GB of storage. We wish that there was more storage space so that we could load more multimedia content but the device is priced cheaper to compensate for the lack of storage space. In the future, we hope they release another version with increased storage space for those that like to watch more movies/audio on the device compared to reading with it. The tablet supports 802.11b/g/n but doesn’t have 3G or bluetooth. We’ll forgive them for leaving out bluetooth but 3G speeds are a must in today’s workplace. Also, the Kindle’s battery life can barely reach 8 hrs. This isn’t too much of a concern as 8hrs. is still a long duration but it’s low when you compare it to most other tablets that can go beyond 8hrs. with some even reaching 10 hrs. in battery life.
Let’s now talk about the Kindle’s interface. It’s called the ‘Carousel’ and allows you to scroll between all of your most recent purchases such as movies, books, music etc. It acts much like Apple’s cover flow software. If you get tired of scrolling between each different section; there’s a favorites section on the bottom where you can pin some of your favorite media to find it more easily. There’s a cloud device on top for everything that you’ve purchased online or offline. You can click it and the device will instantly start downloading it to include on the Kindle for later viewing. Also, the device has a web browser called ‘Silk’ which renders pages decently but has an awkward keyboard that is cramped and made typing things a bit difficult. A lot has been said about this device’s ability to read magazines properly but we often found the text to be too small and not easy to zoom in on certain areas to get a better look at certain sections of a page. One thing we did like is the vibrant colours on the display screen when reading comics and Amazon has partnered with many comic/graphic novel companies to try and make the transition of digital comics an easy one with the Kindle Fire.
Finally, what would a Kindle be if not for being able to read books with it? The Kindle lets you easily bookmark your favorite pages with ease and you can download samples of an author’s work at the Kindle Store if you don’t know whether you want to continue reading that particular author’s work anymore. The device allows you to read with a black font on a white background, a white font on a black background or even a yellow font on a black background. In addition, there’s over 10 fonts to choose from if you disagree with a helvetica font and prefer something else that suits your needs. If you want to turn the page, you can simply double tap on the screen or touch the screen at the edge of a page to scroll forwards or back.
Overall,we were surprised how much we liked this device. It doesn’t perform as great as some of its competitors when it comes to hardware/software but it does most things adequately at a very cheap price point of 200$. We liked the cloud storage function and the ease of downloading/storing any content and being able to load it up with ease. We just hope that they fix some issues with the display screen and the ability to read certain text that was too small and difficult to read at times.
[ratings]
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