MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - So, on a scale of 1 to 10

ssahnan · 11-19-2011, 09:37 PM

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.

11-19-2011, 09:37 PM	#48
ssahnan Enthusiast Posts: 47 Karma: 50 Join Date: Nov 2011 Device: kindle3g, kindle touch, kindle fire, kindle ipad 1 and 2, kindle iphon	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.