David Pogue NY Times article on Fire HD

[jj2me]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/te...f-the-art.html

Gives continuing price of cellular data: "$50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter"

[curtw]

They've already updated the article with three corrections. Among the remaining errors, I wonder if anybody will bother to mention that an iPad 3 set to full brightness will still show battery drain while "charging" through a computer's USB port?

This thread belongs in the Kindle Fire forum.

[wizwor]

When the Fire launched every rag and blog reviewed it. I don't think most of the reviewers even held the device before reviewing. Looks like that trend continues with the Fire HD.

- Drop and Drop Box are available as free apps for the Fire
- Bump is available as a free app for the Fire
- Flixster is available as a free app for the Fire

There are free apps for notes, to-do lists, alarm clock or stopwatch -- lots of them.

There were camera apps for the original Fire. Yep. No one know why there would be a streaming camera app for a device with no camera, but there was one and I assume it works with the Fire HD.

I can understand that an iPad owner on a budget might want to share a tablet with other family members, but I've never met one, to be honest. Most hand down their previous gen devices. Sharing makes less sense when you can equip a whole family for the cost of an iPad. My family paid $630 for four Fires, so multiple logons make no sense for us.

As for the wall charger, the Fire has a standard usb connector and cable. I generally plug the Fire into my PC to charge, but I have a box of usb warts which can be had for less than a buck apiece. I think this guy is wrong about the charging. In my experience, the Fire charges when it is not in transfer mode.

Here's another guy who claims to believe Jeff Bezos was saying that the 7" Fire HD was the best tablet at any price. Of course he was referring to the 9 inch, 4g, 64g model.

I know these guys want to get something in front of the readers fast, but a tablet is a complex device with nuances that cannot be assesed on queue at Starbucks. The Times would have served its readers better by hiring a writer who actually used a Fire to do the review.

No matter. Probably best to wait for unpaid reviews to show up here.

[obsessed2]

Originally Posted by wizwor

I know these guys want to get something in front of the readers fast, but a tablet is a complex device with nuances that cannot be assesed on queue at Starbucks. The Times would have served its readers better by hiring a writer who actually used a Fire to do the review.

No matter. Probably best to wait for unpaid reviews to show up here.

Good point. For example, Pogue says his iPad has faster Wifi than the Fire HD. According to the Chicago Sun Times: DSLreports.com’s tablet speed test consistently shows the Fire HD transacting about 20 percent faster on the same two WiFi networks as my 2012 iPad.


The Chicago Sun Times wasn't as critical of the Fire either.

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/i...-own-kind.html

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by obsessed2

Good point. For example, Pogue says his iPad has faster Wifi than the Fire HD. According to the Chicago Sun Times: DSLreports.com’s tablet speed test consistently shows the Fire HD transacting about 20 percent faster on the same two WiFi networks as my 2012 iPad.


The Chicago Sun Times wasn't as critical of the Fire either.

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/i...-own-kind.html

Pogue was probably comparing the devices in a facility with balls to the walls wifi. I read a review by someone who was able to use wifi in a part of their home where wifi devices do not work. I think those are the people Amazon was trying to help.

[grvthang]

Anyone who's familiar with David Pogue already knows he's the ultimate Apple fanboy.
As for testing the wi-fi, note that he did not conduct bandwidth speed tests - he 'tested' its wifi by seeing how long it took to open particular web pages compared to an ipad. Sounds more like a browser test to me, and not a very scientific one at that - if he had used that same ipad to open these same pages previously, they might have been cached, allowing them to open more quickly.

[wyndslash]

how do these writers get published...*sigh* no wonder there are a lot of misinformed people out there.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by obsessed2

Good point. For example, Pogue says his iPad has faster Wifi than the Fire HD. According to the Chicago Sun Times: DSLreports.com’s tablet speed test consistently shows the Fire HD transacting about 20 percent faster on the same two WiFi networks as my 2012 iPad.

He didn't say it had faster wifi. He said:

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com — and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

Web browsing is combination of how fast your wifi is and how quickly your screen can render the images it's downloaded. It shouldn't be surprising that the iPad is faster, although the importance of that depends on what you're interested in reading: NY Times readers may not mind 7 seconds vs. 6; readers of People may want to look elsewhere...

[wizwor]

and how much of the page is cached. pogue probably consumes the times with cornflakes in the morning.

[grvthang]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

He didn't say it had faster wifi. He said:



Web browsing is combination of how fast your wifi is and how quickly your screen can render the images it's downloaded. It shouldn't be surprising that the iPad is faster, although the importance of that depends on what you're interested in reading: NY Times readers may not mind 7 seconds vs. 6; readers of People may want to look elsewhere...

He certainly implied it. You left out his prior paragraph:

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing.

He used that example to imply that the wifi was nothing to write home about.

[obsessed2]

Originally Posted by grvthang

He certainly implied it. You left out his prior paragraph:

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing.

He used that example to imply that the wifi was nothing to write home about.

Amazon's claim is that the Wi-Fi is 40% faster for media streaming. An unscientific test of a few webpages, while somewhat useful, doesn't necessarily disprove that claim. For example, TechHive said the Fire HD logged the second fastest time they have seen on their custom-built Web page load test., ending in a statistical tie with Samsung's Galaxy Note 10.1.

The Chicago Sun Times used DSLreports.com’s tablet speed test which consistently shows the Fire HD is about 20 percent faster on the same two WiFi networks as the 2012 iPad. While this means Amazons own claim may be in question, it does suggest that over the course of streaming a video that a user may encounter less lag compared to other tablets.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by grvthang

He certainly implied it. You left out his prior paragraph:

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas — a first in a tablet — which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing.

He used that example to imply that the wifi was nothing to write home about.

I read that as saying that it does have faster wifi, but that doesn't mean a whole lot for web browsing, because the overall experience is still slower. I don't really see how it could be read as saying it has slower wifi performance, it says it has slower web browsing performance.

[obsessed2]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

I read that as saying that it does have faster wifi, but that doesn't mean a whole lot for web browsing, because the overall experience is still slower. I don't really see how it could be read as saying it has slower wifi performance, it says it has slower web browsing performance.

You hit the nail on the head, the Kindle Fire HD has slightly slower (not much) browsing performance compared to the iPad.

However, this story confirms what I said in post # 12, the Fire HD does a much better job in the long haul when it comes to long term versus short term media streaming, such as video.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7...re-hd-vs-ipad/




Take aways from what I feel is an unbiased CNET review:

- While the iPad proves a worthy competitor in the streaming-video challenge, the Fire HD currently has no equal in this department.

- From a speed perspective, Amazon's browser comes up short. Silk on the Fire HD is sometimes even slower than on the original Fire, and usually a couple of seconds behind the iPad when loading the same page. (BTW, I was not a fan of the Silk browser on the original Fire and got much better performance from Opera Mini or Dolphin Mini. So while the stock Fire browser may not be as fast as Safari, I'm not sure if the same can be said when it comes to alternative browsers.)

- I don't recommend listening to music through most tablet speakers, but with the Fire HD I make a very clear exception. You've never heard tablet speakers as good as these.

- It's what the Fire HD does with books that really sets it apart ...

- Make no mistake, the iPad is the best tablet you can buy today; however, the Kindle Fire HD is a great alternative if you don't want to spend iPad levels of money or simply want a smaller screen and form factor.

[wizwor]

Web browsing is a complex process. How fast stuff is pulled and pushed is just part of overall performance. Web pages include scripts, objects, and images that need to be processed locally. Some CPUs and renderers (browser/browser helper) are optimized for specific objects. This is why such pedestrian benchmarks are more political than useful.

It would make much more sense to measure performance doing the specific tasks. I can't find the article to link or quote, but one NYTimes review talked about this issue as it applied to Netflix. He walked around his office watching a movie on an ipad and a fire hd. While both streamed even outside the building, the ipad was consistently SD while the Fire was HD. For me, this would be a more important metric than holding a stopwatch on the loading of a web page.