I have in my hands a Kindle Fire, the new $199 (mostly) Android tablet from Amazon. I have had about a day to play around with it so thought I would share my initial impressions. I have had an iPad (1) since launch day, and so that is my main tablet benchmark. I’m sure some of my perspective is biased because of that, but I do think that is a good point of comparison here. Apple still sells refurbished first generation iPads for $399 (as of this writing) and used base models still fetch around $350 on eBay. So, by any measure the Fire undercuts the original multi-touch tablet in price by a longshot.
Design and Interface
Coming from an iPad the first thing that stuck me was that the Fire is considerably smaller. Somehow I thought the 7 inch screen would be closer in size to the iPad’s 9.7 inch screen.
Kindle Fire on an iPad 1
Part of the difference is the aspect ratio (the Fire is narrower) but part is just the math of area relative to diagonal size. In the flesh, it’s pretty close to half the size of the iPad.
Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention to the design in the marketing. I was expecting something a bit slick, and light – based on the ultralight and ultrasleek e-Ink Kindles. But, that was not the case here. I would sum up the entire design as “black rounded rectangle”. It could have been designed in PowerPoint in about 10 minutes.
Kindle Fire - Designed with PowerPoint?
It also seems a bit heavy to me. You can check the exact numbers, but it seems as “dense” as my original iPad. It is not terribly heavy, but I was expecting it to be a bit lighter.
One striking non-feature of the Fire is the lack of any buttons. I am not sure whether this was done to cut corners on production or whether it’s simplification to the point of complexity, but so far I’m not a fan. The only physical button is the power button on the bottom – and as far as I can tell that is all it does. Everything else is done by pulling up or down for menus. That even includes changing the volume, which is really annoying. That’s especially true when playing certain games, like Fruit Ninja. In going for my multi-fruit combos I kept popping up the menus, interrupting the game. A final gripe is that the one and only button is placed such that I kept accidentally mashing it while holding the fire in landscape mode, which leads to a prompt asking me if I want to shut down (no thank you.)
Amazon has installed it’s own unique user interface on the Fire. Rather than the “icons on a desktop” paradigm it is more like a bookshelf. Apple’s iBooks has a similar interface for books, but Amazon has extended it to include all the content and apps. It is organized around media types, and lets you browse your content both on the device and in the Amazon cloud. Major groups look like books on a shelf, and the “home” screen lets you navigate recent items by swiping through a 3D stack of covers and icons. It is intuitive and works well for navigating a moderately-sized library of content, which I am sure was the design goal.
Kindle Fire Keyboard vs iPad
One thing Amazon did not improve on is the Android keyboard. This could be my bias as an iPad user, but I had similar problems with my first-generation Droid. For whatever reason, I make more typos with the Android keyboard. Another gripe is that the horizontal keyboard not very useful. Unlike the iPad’s large keyboard, which is surprisingly “typable”, the Fire’s is just the wrong size. It is too big for thumbs (unless you have Tony Robbins’ hands) and it is well too small for touch typing. However, the spacing for the vertical keyboard is pretty good for thumb use if you have larger hands.
