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Don’t call it a tablet: the Kindle Fire reviewed

The Kindle Fire has landed, and several of Amazon's promises have gone …

Photograph by Casey Johnston

Before it was announced, the Kindle Fire was rumored to be Amazon's entry into the Android tablet market. To get a serious tablet, even a small one, at the Kindle Fire's price of $199 would have been a holiday miracle.

But in our time with the Kindle Fire, it fell far short of what tablets should be able to accomplish. As a vector for Amazon's video and music stores and huge e-book selection, it's great. As an e-reader, it's merely OK. As an Internet and app portal, it falls short of Amazon's promises.

Still, if you're looking for an e-reader and don't mind a smallish LCD screen, a lightweight video player, and a limited-use browser, the Kindle Fire can fill those niches—in its own ambling way.

Looks, weight, feel

The Kindle Fire is heavy for its size, weighing 14.6 ounces and measuring 0.45 inches thick, with slightly rounded edges and corners. The back is rubberized, but the texture does nothing to help you grip it; instead, it's just soft, with the word "Kindle" (no "Fire") embossed on the back. Other outlets, including The Verge, have pointed out how physically similar the Kindle Fire is to the BlackBerry PlayBook, and that's an accurate assessment: except for minor dimensional differences, the lack of cameras, and the embossed back, the Kindle Fire looks closely related to the PlayBook.

The bezel of the Kindle Fire is fairly thin, about half an inch on all sides and a bit more than half an inch at the bottom (as you hold it in portrait mode). This, combined with the weight, makes the Fire a bit difficult to hold with one hand. You have to position your thumb carefully against the edge to avoid accidentally touching the screen, which is not able to filter out accidental edge thumb presses. When it comes to that kind of touch, the Kindle Fire seemed in a state of heightened awareness.

On the other hand, the Kindle Fire didn't respond to some of my taps. This was particularly a problem with the drop-down settings shortcut along the top of the screen, where I could tap something five or six times, or try to drag an indicator along a bar, and get no response. It's remarkable that some parts of the touch experience are so overeager while others just ignore you.

I'm not sure if this inconsistency is better than having a device that consistently overreacts, or that consistently pretends your fingers don't exist. For what it's worth, in my experience the carousel (explained later) is always smooth and over-responsive and the settings bar is always curmudgeonly. So at least the inconsistencies are pretty consistent. Living with the Fire may just be a matter of getting used to these quirks.

The stereo speakers are positioned at the top of the device as you hold it in portrait orientation. This seems unusual, but once you're playing a video and hold the device in landscape, it no longer matters. The speakers are plenty loud, but nothing special in quality, and at the highest volumes there's a fair bit of distortion. A headphone jack embedded in the bottom of the device provides an alternative.

The headphone jack sits next to the micro-USB port for charging and syncing. Next to that is a tiny power button that illuminates when pressed and serves as an indicator for charging states. The positioning of the power button is a little inconvenient, since it's right where our pinky finger sits if we hold the Kindle Fire by the corner, or where the crook of our index finger and thumb rests when holding the Kindle Fire from below. The only reason we can think of for putting the power button there is that the Kindle Fire is following the legacy design of older Kindles. But those older models have a sliding power button in the same spot, a design that's not nearly as vulnerable to accidental presses.

The bottom of the Kindle Fire with headphone jack, microUSB port, and power button.

The Kindle Fire's speakers

I couldn't go for long holding the Kindle Fire like I might hold a paperback, but to be fair, I don't usually hold the much lighter Kindle Keyboard up for long, either. That said, I can hold the Fire up comfortably for much longer than the iPad, which I nearly always rest against my stomach, lap, cat, or other convenient surface. But when I do hold the Kindle Fire up, I shift my grip around a lot, which often ends with an accidental press of the sleep button.

The display on the Kindle Fire is great: bright, crisp, and with nice depth of color (though its black is not very black, as is noticeable next to the very black bezel). Colorwise, the viewing angles are great on both axes, but turning the display in landscape orientation creates a shadowy doubling of what's on the screen. This is particularly noticeable with text. Looking at the screen straight on you see one set of text, but turn it to the side and you see a doppelganger version behind the real one. I found that turning down the brightness (or using the beige background while reading) mitigated the problem.

Interface and operating system

The Kindle Fire runs a modified version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but this is not at all obvious while using the device. Amazon's system for managing applications and tasks is very different from stock Android; the Home/Back/Menu/Search buttons regularly appear in a menu bar along the bottom, but that's the only noticeable resemblance.

When you initially turn on the Kindle Fire, you'll always get a lock screen with some stunning photograph of a retro object: type sets, colored pencils, typewriter keys, rolled up magazines. Gimmicky? Maybe, but I love the pictures and the mindset they put you in, much as I loved the artist portraits and archaic diagrams displayed on sleeping, non-sponsored e-Ink Kindles. They turn out to be a rare instance of attention to detail, something that should stretch to more corners of the Kindle Fire.

Love, love, love the lock screen photos. It's a small thing, but much appreciated.

Swiping the lock screen's yellow bar to the left opens the Kindle Fire up to a kind of home screen. A carousel of your recently used objects—webpages, books, apps—sits front and center. Scrolling through these is always smooth, though the screen can have a hard time stopping on the object you mean to hit. I could more reliably access items by getting them into view at the back of the stack, tapping to bring them to the front, then tapping again once they popped forward. Stopping the carousel's scroll at the right spot proved more finicky.

Below the carousel are your "favorites," big icons sitting on bookshelves. The Kindle Fire will automatically add more shelves as these selections grow in number. You can pull the items down from your carousel and stick them into favorites, or remove favorites by pressing and holding their icons. Given the somewhat convoluted menu/icon system, this is a good way to get to things like the e-mail app right away. Unfortunately you can't stick things like the Amazon Appstore in there, as far as we can see.

You can add items from the carousel to your favorites menu or delete them entirely, but you can't remove them from the carousel view. Instead you just have to wait for the more embarrassing/less useful elements of your library to float to the back of the rack. Anything you've downloaded recently, including apps, will automatically appear at the front of the carousel.

A menu above the carousel includes shortcuts to subsections like the Newsstand, Music, Apps, and Web. Clicking on one of these options takes you to a set of shelves with the relevant objects on them, which you can sort by author, title, or how recently they were viewed. There's also a shortcut link in the top right corner of each subsection that will take you to the relevant Amazon store.

It's moderately annoying that there's not a universal store to search. For instance, if you want an application, you first have to navigate to the application tab, click "Store," and then you can search for an app. When I first started using the Kindle Fire, I tried to find things to download from the search bar on the home screen, but that search bar searches only your own library or the Web. Likewise, the search bar within the Apps tab searches only apps you've already downloaded.

While most of the menu options will open on your own library, the Video tab always takes me to the video storefront. I interpret this as the Kindle Fire saying, "Let's be real, you must already be tired of whatever you've put in my 6GB of storage!" (Amazon has also heavily invested in the rights to stream video of hit TV shows and movies.) The storefront looks far more plentiful; the problem is that you own none of it. If you're a Prime subscriber, the free streamable stuff is front and center in the store, which is a consumer-friendly arrangement.

The Fire has a convenient menu you can pull down from the top of the screen, indicated by a small gear icon next to the WiFi and battery indicator, but as we noted earlier, it's tough to control with your fingers. From this menu you can adjust the brightness, volume (there are no external volume buttons, which seems risky but forward-looking), WiFi settings, sync options, or jump to a full-fledged settings menu. The rest of the settings are pretty sparse—for instance, in the "Sounds" menu you can adjust the volume again or set your notification sounds to a tone like "caffeinated rattlesnake," while in the "Display" menu you can set the screen timeout and brightness.

The basic settings menu you can pull down from anywhere on the Kindle Fire is nifty, if unresponsive.

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