So, on a scale of 1 to 10 - ARE YOU HAPPY?

[gweminence]

All modern routers do.

[markkenzy]

10 out of 10. No complains at all.

[ssahnan]

i'd say at times I feel its a 4-5, some moments it's a 7-8, end of the day probably settles in at a 5-6.

the carasouel is lousy in every which way imaginable, not sure how that got thru product testing, what an absolute miserable execution. the unresponsive screen(namely the back button) is also a huge issue. web browsing thru silk is nothing remotely close to what it was hyped to be, i find it clunky and scrolling is choppy. the sporadic crashes are also annoying. The cloud drive not really being integrated into this device sans the music is a huge negative for me as well. To not be able to stream pics, docs and video in the required format thats been uploaded to the cloud drive is a huge miss for me. Also, heck if I see any difference between the book reader on the fire and the one on ipads and other android devices. It seems like the same thing to me, no x-ray, no text to speech and the biggest miss, no collections to organize it better. Heck, even my ipad kindle app had things not on the fire, the ipad kindle app could have book extras that accessed shelfari but the same book on the fire has none of that. Event he facebook app is not really a facebook app, it's just a shortcut to the web page in silk.

I waited a few days to comment as I have the bias of coming from a ios environment with mutliple iterations of iphones and ipads, etc, and I have never been a android fan but by in large, the whole os on the fire just feels clunky and not very well thought out. As in the ign review last night, I really wanted to like this device, I really did but I'm not sure I can. For those that rail on the ios appstore policies, trying the various fire apps is all the proof needed on why ios does it right. More then an acceptable amount of the apps run buggy, not smooth, clunky, they feel like apps that are being made for a bazzilion devices. Bought asphalt 6 on it today, volume was too loud to begin with so I went to change it thru the whole ridiculous hit the bottom arrow, the menu button then hit up top to adjust the volume and when I finally did, the game resets to the loading screen again and worse yet, the volume never changed. I had to do it within the app's settings. Now I get this is on the developer but lack of physical buttons and no master volume swtiches on the outside really force the developers into strange work arounds as well.

all of that is fixable thru future software fixes but what's not and what keeps it from being a 9-10 device is lack of any physical buttons to control the os and no hard volume buttons. It will always feel like a clunky device without atleast one physical button to do quick quits or volume buttons to do quick changes. Also, I am concerned that the software mountain to climb to deal with all the short comings is so massive, we may not get many fixes before it becomes relatively abondoned for a Fire model 2. For as cheap as the device is, the hardware base is there for something better then this.

I've tried to accomadate the fact it's only a 200$ device into my rant but most of my rant is software side so I just don't think it should have shipped with this many bugs. It's almost as if it really doesn't have the proc they claim it has as well. If that's a dual core proc then they sure need better programmers to optimize it better.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by ssahnan

i'd say at times I feel its a 4-5, some moments it's a 7-8, end of the day probably settles in at a 5-6.

the carasouel is lousy in every which way imaginable, not sure how that got thru product testing, what an absolute miserable execution. the unresponsive screen(namely the back button) is also a huge issue. web browsing thru silk is nothing remotely close to what it was hyped to be, i find it clunky and scrolling is choppy. the sporadic crashes are also annoying. The cloud drive not really being integrated into this device sans the music is a huge negative for me as well. To not be able to stream pics, docs and video in the required format thats been uploaded to the cloud drive is a huge miss for me. Also, heck if I see any difference between the book reader on the fire and the one on ipads and other android devices. It seems like the same thing to me, no x-ray, no text to speech and the biggest miss, no collections to organize it better. Heck, even my ipad kindle app had things not on the fire, the ipad kindle app could have book extras that accessed shelfari but the same book on the fire has none of that. Event he facebook app is not really a facebook app, it's just a shortcut to the web page in silk.

I waited a few days to comment as I have the bias of coming from a ios environment with mutliple iterations of iphones and ipads, etc, and I have never been a android fan but by in large, the whole os on the fire just feels clunky and not very well thought out. As in the ign review last night, I really wanted to like this device, I really did but I'm not sure I can. For those that rail on the ios appstore policies, trying the various fire apps is all the proof needed on why ios does it right. More then an acceptable amount of the apps run buggy, not smooth, clunky, they feel like apps that are being made for a bazzilion devices. Bought asphalt 6 on it today, volume was too loud to begin with so I went to change it thru the whole ridiculous hit the bottom arrow, the menu button then hit up top to adjust the volume and when I finally did, the game resets to the loading screen again and worse yet, the volume never changed. I had to do it within the app's settings. Now I get this is on the developer but lack of physical buttons and no master volume swtiches on the outside really force the developers into strange work arounds as well.

all of that is fixable thru future software fixes but what's not and what keeps it from being a 9-10 device is lack of any physical buttons to control the os and no hard volume buttons. It will always feel like a clunky device without atleast one physical button to do quick quits or volume buttons to do quick changes. Also, I am concerned that the software mountain to climb to deal with all the short comings is so massive, we may not get many fixes before it becomes relatively abondoned for a Fire model 2. For as cheap as the device is, the hardware base is there for something better then this.

I've tried to accomadate the fact it's only a 200$ device into my rant but most of my rant is software side so I just don't think it should have shipped with this many bugs. It's almost as if it really doesn't have the proc they claim it has as well. If that's a dual core proc then they sure need better programmers to optimize it better.

I haven't had one crash. If your Fire is crashing I would reset to factory default and if it still crashes get it replaced. The Fire is quite stabled compared to other tablets with 2.3.

[ssahnan]

Originally Posted by Blossom

I haven't had one crash. If your Fire is crashing I would reset to factory default and if it still crashes get it replaced. The Fire is quite stabled compared to other tablets with 2.3.

i did, last night. they aren't frequent, just when added up with the other flaws didn't paint a picture I was very impressed with. I think the key is not to push this thing and hope for some stellar software updates. with it being their first tablet, hard to tell what sort of company amazon will be with regards to software programming for this thing. even if i felt the device is a 6, based off the price it's still not bad. just nowhere near a 10 in my mind like some stated. It definitely needs more refinement.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by ssahnan

i did, last night. they aren't frequent, just when added up with the other flaws didn't paint a picture I was very impressed with. I think the key is not to push this thing and hope for some stellar software updates. with it being their first tablet, hard to tell what sort of company amazon will be with regards to software programming for this thing. even if i felt the device is a 6, based off the price it's still not bad. just nowhere near a 10 in my mind like some stated. It definitely needs more refinement.

It shouldn't be crash if you're having crashing something may be wrong with your unit. What were doing when the crash occurred?

[anijh]

When I first received my Kindle Fire I was going to leave it unopened and return it to Amazon due to some of the negative reviews but I'm glad I decided to give it a try over the weekend. It's really not as bad as some of the harshest reviews made it out to be. It's not an iPad, duh.

I loaded it up with some of the "must have" apps, a few books, and some music and was good to go. For those apps that needed side-loading, I thought the process was pretty painless. Everything that I tried side-loading worked.

I enjoyed playing with it and loved using it for bedtime reading. I would rate it a 7.5 right now. Amazon needs to work out a few bugs and update a few things such as the one-click purchase and carousel for a higher score.

[Tanzaku]

Seems like the carousel is pretty universally getting trounced, but I'm finding it a lot more useful than I thought I would. In fact, thumbs up.

Now that I have 1000+ books, 100 albums of music, a couple hundred PDFs in my personal docs section, and 40 apps, I can see the logic of the carousel. It's not useful at all for finding something — but it is fantastic at helping me find a recent something. It reminds me of the "Recent documents" area on a Windows computer — a useless filing system, but a handy way to get back to something you were doing an hour ago.

In particular, I'm loving that the carousel is agnostic — books, apps, music, documents, web pages. That's really handy.

BTW, I also see the carousel being half of a two-part strategy. The search tool is the other half. It great that I can type MANT and the search brings up the Mantano Reader, for example. I.e., the search is agnostic, too. Nice.

So, search to find something known; carousel to find something recent; libraries to look for a particular kind of content. I like it.

One small complaint about the carousel is the speed. I wish I could slow it down a bit. Also, I wonder if people would feel differently about it if it had been named differently — Recent Stuff, or something clever like that?

[abookreader]

I've just finally after several days of setting up my new Kindle Touch, pulled the Fire out of the box and started playing around.

My initial impression is that it is pretty and things work well

BUT

The 8GB limitation plus the difficulty of pulling personal video down from the cloud storage to the Fire seriously limits the practicality of the device. I have numerous old DVDs that I have saved in digital form. First, I can't store all of them in the Cloud because I'm not willing to pay. Second, once I do make a decision as to what videos to put out there .... I then have to re-download them to the device, which has that really limited storage capacity. Really, a micro sd card slot would make me feel so much better about all this. I could buy a high capacity card and load a bunch of movies on it and stick it in. I think Amazon is going to have to make a choice here in the long run, higher internal storage or cave on adding the SD card slot.

I'm not sure what is up with the not streaming movies the way you can music from the cloud. I finally got a movie to download and then play but it was way too many steps. I know that Apple has been having real problems with the movie industry in getting permission to store and then stream iTunes purchased movies from the iCloud. I wonder if it is these legal issues that are also hampering Amazon.

Also right now I've been keeping an eye on the Amazon Kindle board and it seems like even the Amazon Help Desk employees aren't educated on what is up with personal video playing.

Right now I'm going to give it a 5 or a 6. I'm a tad bit disappointed. I don't think Amazon hit it out of the park here and I was really hoping they would. It seems like there still isn't a really great 7" tablet solution.

[Skydog]

Originally Posted by SCION

Can you grab something from the Android Market and use that? I use BeyondPod on my Sony Tablet, but didn't pull it off because it's the Honeycomb version. I'll have to download the standard one and use that. I use it for podcasts and other feeds.

BeyondPod is outstanding with excellent customer support. I use it daily on my Xoom 4G and Droid X. My favorite app!

I'll rate the Fire at 9.5.

Originally Posted by jswinden

I give it 8 or 9 overall.

Reading

I primarily bought it for reading, and I give that a solid 9. Amazon definitely needs to refine the reader app a bit, but they are closer on the Fire than ever before, and compared to stock reader apps from other manufacturers it is pretty darn good. But they need to offer things like:

• Two-page landscape mode
• Bottom status bar needs to show chapter/section divisions
• Posting book quotes to Facebook and Twitter

This remains true, but I want to point out that it is fairly easy to add 3rd party reader apps like Mantano thus giving you ePub reading ability too. This is a huge plus and makes the reading capabilities of the KFire even better.

Apps

I give it a 7 or 8 because it is somewhat limited. For example, I would like to be able to sync with my Google Calendars but this is problematic due to the inability to set up Google accounts/services.

I would now give this a 8 or 9 as it is fairly easy to sideload apps and there are apps which will allow you to get around the lack of Google services.

Interface

I give it a 6 or 7. The Carousel is the absolute most useless feature they could have, at least as it is currently implemented. This need to be modified or perhaps completely deleted. I cannot imagine how cluttered and useless it will be when you have thousands of books, songs, videos, et cetera. At the very least, allow it to be toggled on/off and give it categories (collections).

I understand why they dumbed down the interface so people could learn it more quickly, but it would be nice to have fuller access to the Android settings.

The Carousel needs to have viewing options added to limit what we want to have displayed. Good news is that alternative launchers work with the KFire, so there is hope that 3rd party launchers will some day greatly improve usability if Amazon doesn't.

Web Browsing

I give it a 7. It is a small screen device so I understand there will be limitations. However I had to turn off the browsing acceleration as the Amazon servers seemed to drag down performance, often causing pages to refuse to load. With acceleration off, ironically, the browser works much better but it is still not great by any means. Opera Mini loaded and works a bit better in some cases.

After 3 days of reading and implementing browser hints from MR members I have greatly improved my browsing experience in the stock browser. Additionally I have added Opera Mini, though I like the stock browser best now that I have it set up to work better. I now give browsing a 9 or 10.

Music, Video, Games

No comment as I don't do these on my Fire, at least not yet.

Build Quality

I give it a 10 as this is a solidly built, well designed device. And it is priced below what it is worth.

Overall

It has a few faults, but nothing that cannot be overcome with time. Since it works out well for all the tasks I use it for, I give it a 9 overall. I hope to sell my iPad as the Fire is much more to my liking as far as size and weight, but time will tell. If after a few weeks I realize I no longer pick up the iPad much, then I will sell it. I do think the Fire has a good chance of filling in for everything I use my iPad for, but again only time will tell.

I have indeed decided to sell my iPad as everything I do on it can be done on my KFire, and I like the KFire's smaller size and lighter weight which make it much more portable and much more comfortable to hold and use.

After 3 more days of use I would upgrade my experience and rating of the KFire to a very solid 9. Keep in mind though that I don't use the music and video functions. I updated a few earlier comments I made. Updated comments are in blue in the above quote.

[ectoplasm]

Originally Posted by jswinden

After 3 days of use I would upgrade my experience and rating of the KFire to a very solid 9. Keep in mind though that I don't use the music and video functions. I updated a few earlier comments I made. Updated comments are in blue in the above quote.

Excellent and balanced review, especially after the followup. I like the way you broke down the different functional areas, rather than rate the whole device based on a single area.

I would guess the ability to customize will only get better as smart developers have time to adjust.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by jswinden

After 3 days of use I would upgrade my experience and rating of the KFire to a very solid 9. Keep in mind though that I don't use the music and video functions. I updated a few earlier comments I made. Updated comments are in blue in the above quote.

Me too! I give it a solid 9 here due to excellent battery it has! I didn't get to use my Fire all day yesterday so it was sleeping the whole time. When I got ready for bed this morning. I turn the Fire on it had a full battery still! So I use it for about an hour this morning before bed. I showed hubby the Prime movies and we watch about 10 minutes of one and how well they looked on the Fire. I read a chapter on the Kindle app which I find myself using more and more thanks to Screen Filter. Checked out Facebook, the forums and my news RSS feeds.

Now I just woke up brought my KF downstairs and the battery is at 80% which was what it was when I put it to sleep this morning before bed.

Last time it was taken off the charger was 1:30pm Saturday which is the the time I wake up. I'm seriously impressed!

[kennyc]

Well after using my Kindle Fire for about 5 days I can say honestly that I'm in Love!

It has virtually replaced my Xoom and is much lighter/smaller/easier (The 10" Xoom screen though is the best for websurfing and pdf's -- but the Fire certainly suffices no major issues just sometimes requires zooming or shifting pages.

The Bookreading is superb, it does my email and forums with no problems, the video is WONDERFUL and I'm probably a lifetime convert to Prime. I began watching Firefly first episode on the Fire, moved to my real TV (Vizio that has the Amazon App) -- it automatically syncs between them) -- and finished watching it there, so now of course I have to watch the remaining episodes.

one a scale of 1-10 I give this device a 12!

Sorry for the seeming fan-boi posting, but it really is that good.
As was said in this MSNBC review: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news...-its-that-good

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

I got DOSBox and Windows 3.1 to run on the Fire this morning. 10/10 for me. .

I need details. Been playing Risk since the 80s.