The Kindle Fire is a poor man’s iPad, in more ways than one.
Amazon’s new tablet, released this November to much fanfare, has already earned a rare distinction: it’s the first tablet not made by Apple to gain any market traction. Granted, other tablets have experienced a few buying spurts here and there – most notably, Hewlett-Packard’s Touchpad, which only attracted customer attention after HP cut prices by 80 per cent while trying to unload an otherwise dead product line. But so far, anyone who wants a tablet and can afford an iPad is buying an iPad.
The Fire isn’t going to change any of that. It is far more polished than the Vox, Kobo’s e-reader-turned-tablet, which is currently on store shelves in Canada, and it also taps the user in to a far more comprehensive digital store (although the Vox has the slightly better screen). But the Fire isn’t as polished, powerful or beautifully designed as the iPad. It also suffers from several minor drawbacks (and one major issue). Like the iPad, the Fire is also a sort of content-consumption gateway drug, something Amazon hopes will make you far more likely to buy your music, movies and books from the same place you bought your tablet.
What the Fire does have going for it is price. At $200, consumers are likely to forgive a lot of deficiencies, especially given that most other tablets at that price point range from rush jobs to outright failures. The Fire doesn’t wow, but it delivers decent performance at a low price, and that’s really the only remotely successful strategy anybody has employed to compete with the iPad.
The Fire isn’t available yet in Canada, and there’s no word on when it’ll come north of the border. That’s in large part because of licensing issues – Amazon’s massive store of movies, music and books comes with all kinds of geographic strings attached.
But thanks to the Globe’s industrious Washington bureau, we managed to snag a U.S. model.
In terms of design, the Fire looks a lot like a less sleek version of Research In Motion’s PlayBook. Its front is a seven-inch touchscreen, and its back is a smooth rubbery cover. There’s a micro-USB port and headphone jack at one end of the device, and a couple of terrible-sounding speakers on the other (side note: with the exception of the PlayBook, the on-board speakers on virtually every tablet are awful, so invest in a decent pair of headphones).There isn’t a single physical button, with the exception of the one that turns the device on and off.
The Fire runs on a heavily modified version of Google’s Android operating system, which means you’ll get access to the myriad Android apps out there. But apps aren’t really the tablet’s strong suit. Some of them felt laggy, which is somewhat surprising, given that the Fire runs on a 1-gigahertz dual-core processor, which is pretty powerful for a $200 device.
Where the Fire shines is as a multimedia consumption device – or rather, as a multimedia collection device. Just as Apple’s business strategy revolves around sucking you into their content-purchasing ecosystem via the iTunes store, Amazon intends the Fire to be a portal to its massive everything-store.
(In fact, it’s almost too easy to purchase items through the Fire. Amazon has a one-click purchase system that basically lets anyone with access to an account-enabled tablet buy whatever they want with minimal confirmation. This is going to be a problem for anyone whose kids get a hold of this thing.)
The Fire’s user interface, where all your content lives, is fairly clean. The home screen functions as a sort of “most-visited” collection of apps, videos, books and whatever else you’ve recently used on the device. Here, the processor hums along nicely, and touchscreen commands are quick. Flipping through various items also offers virtually no lag.
Its designed in the layout of a bookshelf, with subheadings for various types of content, such as books, music, video and the Web. And everywhere it’s possible to buy content, Amazon ushers you to its various on-line stores. None of this is all that surprising, and in fact, Amazon’s stores contain a huge amount of great audio/video/eBook content (much of which will be gutted by licensing restrictions in Canada, no doubt).
