I received my Kindle Fire today (I missed the UPS driver yesterday). It is a fairly nice device: very responsive virtual keyboard, friendly interface and fairly responsive. The Kindle Fire plays a decent game of Plants vs. Zomies as well… It is, however, pretty thick- I assume this is to allow for a larger battery- but this can be over looked.
One feature that really annoys the Hell out of me is the lack of physical volume control buttons; I do not like scrambling to find the soft menu volume controls when an app/game volume is much too loud.
I can definitely say that this device will NOT be a suitable replacement for me as an e-book e-ink device; scrolling down a zoomed in page in a magazine is way too jerky- the image tearing reminds me of a video game that has v-sync turned off.
For some reason the Kindle Fire is a 16x9 screen format- and none of the books or magazines in the market are natively this size; makes me wonder why Amazon didn’t go with a 4x3 screen format… I mean this was primarily designed to be an ebook/magazine reader, right?
About an hour after I opened the box, I became bored and figured out how to root it…
After that I installed the Google Apps and fixed the Android Market, I installed ADW launcher to replace the Kindle Desktop.
Just for the irony, I also installed the Nook reader…
In summary, the Kindle fire is a decent Android tablet, good for games and web browsing, terrible as a book/magazine reader. For the $200 price, you will be hard pressed to find a similar device- unless you look to the Pandigital devices.
Personally I am seriously considering returning my Kindle fire and picking up a HTC Flyer from BestBuy for $100 more…
