Thread: iPad 2 or Kindle Fire?
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Old 11-22-2011, 12:04 PM   #4
twowheels
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ipadaltkc View Post
I'm debating right now on a Christmas gift for someone. I can't decide between the new kindle fire tablet or the i-pad2. Both seem pretty cool but I can't really see many differences between the two other than the large touch pad screen on the i-pad2. Can anybody give me some good pointers on differences between the two please?
I was recently debating between these two for my own purposes. I ended up going with the iPad2, and am very happy with the decision... a coworker has shown me his Kindle Fire* briefly, but I've not used it.

Some things that pushed me over the edge...
  • As closed as the iPad is, the Kindle is even more closed... (without hacks)
  • The iPad2 has a front facing camera, which I use daily for Facetime video calls...
  • The Kindle has lesser hardware specs overall... this shows in the lack of smoothness in the UI compared to the iPad (partially caused by Android not being as smooth)...
  • Frustrations with my Android phone have biased me (a big time open source advocate, and 18 year Linux user) against the Android experience lately...

/warning, geek talk ahead/

As a software engineer I looked at the issues that I've had with poor Android performance and realized that a lot of them are due to architectural design decisions at the lowest levels, and realized that Android based devices MUST have much more power to be able to perform at the same level as iOS devices. Everything from running interpreted code vs. native, allowing apps free reign, to run background services whenever and whatever, chewing up CPU time and memory (I'm looking at you Rhapsody!!), activity implementation encourages poor separation between presentation and implementation code, forced re-creation of current activity on device rotation (unless you incur significant programming difficulty), encouraging poorly written programs... etc, etc, etc...

Anyhow... all of that stuff added up... yes, Amazon has resolved some of the above issues by having their own "walled garden", but the OS still allows poorly written apps to run roughshod over the whole system, and some of the worst offenders are in their app store.



* Kindle Fire -- I've always thought of the word "Kindle" in the e-reader context as a proper noun, but it sure acts like a verb there. :-)
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