Kindle Fire

UPDATE: I bought both a Fire HD and a Gen 2. (as a present to my mother in law) My initial reviews were written after playing with them for like 20 minutes. I merged both reviews into one to really compare the two products. I'm still answering questions in the comments if you have any. And see the video that compares the two and gives a mini tour of the Kindle system.

My Background: I've had 4 android phones, I've had multiple e-readers and my latest 'touch' device is the Le Pan II Android tablet. I've worked on several iPads but never been compelled to spend the extra money for one myself. Wife has a first generation Fire.
============

The new Kindle Fire and Fire HD are the second generation color kindle e-reader/media player/tablet devices. The original Fire received a lot of well earned 4 star reviews. It was a great product but at the end of the day, it was a first generation product. It was no iPad slayer. The Fire HD raises the bar and raises it quite a lot. Jeff Bezos said they set out to make the best tablet available period and -in some regards- they did that in spades. In other ways not so much. (more on this below in the closing thoughts)

HARDWARE:

BUILD QUALITY:
- BOTH are top Notch. I didn't expect anything less from Amazon but they really are solid feeling.
- FIRE HD lighter and while it is about the same thickness, the edges are rounded more like an iPad. sleeker look and more comfortable to hold.
- FIRE GEN 2 is heavier and 'boxier' built to more fit existing covers I guess. It's heavier too.

SIZING:
The HD is just a bit taller but a decent bit wider than the Fire. --- NOTE pay attention to accessories because THEY ARE NOT THE SAME SIZE. The cover from my wife's Gen 1 Kindle will fit the Gen 2 kindle (sorta) but NOT THE HD.

THE SCREEN:
- FIRE HD SUMMED UP IN TWO WORDS Oh. My. The Le Pan, the iPads and the Gen 2 Fire all have great screens. The Fire HD takes them all out. I read somewhere there was polarizing a filter over the Fire HD screen. Polarizers reduce glare by only letting 'straight' light though not off angle bounced light. This makes an enormous difference to this display. The off angle viewing is probably the best I have seen in any flat screen. 6 stars.
- FIRE GEN 2 Still a high quality screen. I'd same the same or better than any other high end tablet on the market.
- NOTE A few people in the comments asked about the touch response. - I do not have a problem except in the browser, it is sorta too sensitive. If you move your finger smoothly you can avoid the jitters.

THE WIFI.
- FIRE HD I admit only the geeky probably care but the wifi rocks. I have a mimo router and one quick copy from my server and I was getting almost 30MB/s. To put that into perspective, that's about as fast and an external USB Hard drive can push data to your computer. (USB 3.0 will be faster but they are rare today) -- The other thing is that I have a long skinny house and when I'm in the back bath, the Le Pan drops off. (ahem not that I surf on the potty or anything, just when I test it, you know.) With the Fire HD I can surf in the back yard.
- FIRE GEN 2 still got 20MB/sec. But consider this... at that speed you can fill the entire memory in 5 minutes. Seems good enough to me.

THE SOUND:
- FIRE HD ok I'm a bit of an audio snob. The sound is fantastic for being a tablet. Which is to say it's still only marginally acceptable. You can still buy a $15 pair of Koss KSC75 headphones and blow the speakers away BUT I will say this is the first device I would actually listen to music on. The rest I simply don't even bother. I suspect most people would call the sound excellent.
- FIRE GEN 2 still have a very good sound. For the spoken word it would be very fine. For music it is lacking in my book.

SPEED: Both are quick with the HD being quicker. The Le Pan II is no slouch but I think the HD edges it out. Since the Le Pan apparent died this morning it's hard to compare. :-(

NOTE: IT DOES NOT COME WITH A WALL WORT CHARGER It comes with a micro USB cable that can be used with your existing USB wall worts. (ie your cell phone charger) You can buy a rapid charger for it or even plug it into your computer to charge. This is an odd choice from Amazon IMO.

NOTE 2: Unlike the Gen 1 Fire, (and contrary to what you might have read) the new Kindles DO NOT support flash. Rumor has it you can hack it to install Flash I have not tried yet. I'll try to run this down by this weekend.

NEW FEATURES (as promised)

EXCHANGE CALENDAR SYNC:
BOTH - Exchange on the Fire (both) just rocks. I really like the calendar app. The contact manager can't keep up with the one on the iPad but it is sufficient. Ditto the email. But the setup was easy and it seemed fast. Love it.

SKYPE:
- FIRE HD Spent way too long video skyping today. It worked as well as skype ever works. (long time skype users will understand that) yes it was glitchy but less than other platforms so no complaints. The sound really made a difference here.
- Fire GEN 2 I don't think Skype came with it. I'll update with a definitive later.

HDMI
- FIRE HD ONLY I promised someone in the comments to test this soon but I misplaced my HDMI cable. (drat) I guess I'll order a new one and update when it arrives.

BLUETOOTH
- FIRE HD ONLY worked very smoothly pairing with LG tone. (great product btw) I'll be using that for Skype in the future.

FREETIME: BOTH This is a widely requested feature that allows multiple users (i.e. kids) to log in and have their own customized tablet experience. It also allows parents to limit the time kids spend on certain tasks, like watching movies, while giving them unlimited time to read. Parents have been asking for this forever. (Are you listening Apple?) I wasted 20 minutes looking for it before I looked it up and Amazon is not shipping it until next month. The existing parental controls are pretty decent actually.

CLOSING THOUGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS:

If you're new to Kindle make sure you understand what you are buying here. Kindles are made -and sold at a highly discounted price- to allow you to purchase media from Amazon. Don't think of this as an android tablet, because it really isn't. Yes Amazon uses the Android operating system but you'd never know they hide it so well. This device is made (basically) exclusively to read/watch/listen to media you buy from Amazon. In that regard this device is about as great as they could make it. HOWEVER. The Kindle Fire (first generation) was notorious for not playing well with many Android apps. If you're a app monster or looking for something to replace your laptop to allow you do work on the road and occasionally consume media, you need to look at an Android tablet or an iPad. But don't let that discourage you:

Via Amazon Prime, you get 25,000 streaming movies and T.V. shows you can watch 24/7 unlimited. We dropped Netflix because Prime Instant Video was so good. Amazon gives you a free month with the either Fire so you'll get to see the value before you buy. (it's a no brainer btw) There are also over a million free books available for the Kindle. I try to limit how many I buy/download but I have over 100 books on my previous Kindle that are waiting to be read, all but like 4 of them were free. Also if you own a Kindle and subscribe to Prime, you can borrow one book per month from the Paid section. And big name books too... all 7 Harry Potter books are up there. If you figure that is worth at least 10 bucks a month, you're getting $120 of content per year and Prime only costs (I think) $79. Or looked at another way, that's $240 in content in two years and the Fire HD is only $199.

If you're new to e-readers, owning one might just change your life. I had probably read 8 book length books in the last decade. (I'm a periodical junkie.) I now read at least one book per week. I was a big reader before but I'm reading more than I ever have in my life. Many studies show that people are reading as much as 3X more when they get an e-reader. If you're a parent looking to inspire a love of reading in a child, STOP. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200. Buy them an e-reader.

SO THE BIG QUESTION, WHICH ONE DO I BUY?
- If you're on a VERY tight budget the Fire Gen 2 is a great product at a great price point. Coupled with Prime, you have access to mountains of cheap content.
HOWEVER. When you look at what you get for the small difference in cost, the Fire HD blows it away... You get a better screen, better sound, bluetooth, it's faster, thinner and lighter than the Fire. You also get double the memory, better wifi and over 2 hours more battery life. All for $40. I guess Amazon wants to make color Kindles as affordable as possible but I don't even know why they made the small one. I'm not sorry I bought it but all things considered, I would buy two big ones if I had it to do over.

I'll be taking questions in the comments for the next week or maybe more, so feel free to ask.

Hope this was helpful.

My 7 year old son has the 1st gen Kindle Fire, and we've been very happy with it. He mostly plays games on it now, but we plan to purchase more movies and books for it in the future. My 5 year old wanted one too, so we just purchased the 2nd gen Kindle Fire for her. She had been saving her allowance and birthday money this whole year for it - we only had about $165 saved and thought it would be another few months before we could afford to get her one - so we were thrilled when the 2nd gen Fire came out at $159. We purchased one the day they were announced!

We've had it now for 3 days... and while it's still the same great product, we were disappointed to find (after receiving the device) that the 2nd generation Fire comes WITHOUT a wall charger (which the first gen Fire had) and has a whole mess of ads loaded onto it. My 5 year old can't even read yet - she couldn't figure out how to get rid of the ads, and was constantly yelling for me to come help her. Also, some of the ads featured more mature themes (ads for sexy prime time tv shows, for example) that I normally would not want to expose my young child to.

To purchase the wall charger, it looks like it's going to cost us an extra $20, and it cost us $15 to have the ads turned off. So now we're up to $194 for the Kindle Fire that we thought we were getting for $159, plus a whole bunch of time wasted trying to figure out how to turn off the ads, and waiting for the wall charger to arrive.

I am normally a HUGE Amazon fan, but this one leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Would have given the device 4-5 stars on its own, but with the extra (HIDDEN) expenses, I have to take it down a couple stars.

***Update Oct 10, 2012*** Interesting that many folks have taken my review as an opportunity to comment on my parenting skills. While I'm sure folks are well intentioned, I don't recall asking for parenting advice. I think part of the issue here is that many folks think of the Kindle simply as an eReader, and have commented that it's ridiculous to buy an eReader for a child who can't read. Yet the Kindle FIRE is marketed as a competitor to the iPad, not an eReader. The Fire does everything the iPad can do (except take pictures and videos). Further, Amazon features young children playing with the device in their own TV commercials. Like many of us still do, my children prefer to read books on paper. My children use the Fire almost exclusively as a gaming device as there are hundreds of free (or super cheap) game apps for kids. They also listen to their favorite songs on the Kindle. I looked at it as a replacement for my daughter's leapster (which she is aging out of) and as an alternative to a portable DVD player or iPod. Several devices in one. As we are getting ready to take the kids on a cross-country flight soon, I will be thrilled not to have to lug around several devices that come with DVDs and expensive game cartridges that are easily lost. We will pack one device. Done.

To sum up what I will tell you about in the details below, for just $159 you are getting one heck of a deal on a tablet computer - especially if you compare it to the $199 for the first-generation Fire this one is replacing and the $500 or more you can spend on a Wi-Fi version of the iPad. Overall, if you consider the price and the functionality I think this is an outstanding tool / toy. My review below compares a lot of the features of this version of the Fire to the original Fire, but also some of the features for a first-time user.

Wi-Fi Connectivity:

My standard test for trying out new gadgets is to see how fast they run side-by-side with a known piece of equipment doing the same test at the best place of Wi-Fi in my house and the worst place where it drags. In this comparison, I had this version of the Fire sitting next to the previous version of the Fire, my Motorola RAZR smartphone, my iPad 2 (yes, the Kindle guy uses an iPad for work), and the new 7" Fire HD (the Fire HD is in a separate yet similar review) all just using a Wi-Fi connection vs. cellular connectivity..

My website test is to hit the mobile websites of FoxNews, CNN, my personalized Yahoo page, Google, and the Houston Chronicle. The ones that were usually slow on the other devices and were slow on the Kindle Fire (Houston Chronicle and CNN), and for the other sites I couldn't tell a difference in speed at the location closest to my router. When I went to the slowest / worst reception location of my house, the speed did not have a noticeable difference in the other devices, except it did lose connection on CNN. Basic web searches on Google were all at the same speed.

Screen Display / Video Playback:

Amazon has made a few tweaks in the display / resolution, and I compared the viewing experience watching - don't laugh - the first episode of the Wonder Woman TV series from the 70's. The display on this Fire was one heck of a lot better in terms of sharpnessthan last year's model. For you technical folks out there, the display is the same 1024x600 on last year's model yet looked crisper - the only thing I can attribute that to is last year's model I have has been used quite a bit and maybe there is some decrease in the view over time or it could be because I have a 3M screen protector on the old and haven't put one on yet with the new. I don't know, it's just better looking.

Sound / Music Playback:

Similar to last year's model, the two speakers are located at the top of the Kindle Fire in two not-noticeable ports. My test of this feature was cranking up Van Halen's Panama to maximum volume (I wanted to see if it could really play the guitar licks), and I would alternate covering one speaker up over the other: you have true stereo sound with no degradation of the sound that makes you think you are about to blow the speaker. The headphone jack is located at the bottom of the unit just to the left of the power switch and the micro-USB port. I don't like the placement here, as I tend to read books in the portrait mode (up / down similar to holding a book) vs. landscape mode, and the bottom of my headphone cord tends to "poke" you in the leg while reading and listening to a song at the same time.

Email Setup:

Email setup was very easy, but I will tell you I am using an existing app called Enhanced Email that I received here on the Amazon app store for free vs. what came as standard with the Fire. I did setup the email app that came with the program with no problem - it took about a minute to setup my main Google account - and I was able to send and receive emails with no problem. For those of you asking yourself why am I using the Enhanced Email program, the simple answer is like many of you I have more than one email account: you can quickly switch back and forth on the accounts with the tool. The lazy person in me appreciates that as I don't like getting out of the lazy chair once I'm settled in!

New Tabs and Screen Layout:

In addition to the normal Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, and Web tabs Amazon has added a new look and feel to the overall display such as rather than 5 rows of 5 apps per row on the apps tab it is now 4 rows of apps with 4 apps per row which means bigger icons and fonts (yes), but more things to scroll through to find what you are looking for. To offset that pain, I think that's why the added the new tabs called Shop, Games, Audiobooks, and Offers. While many of these are self-explanatory, there are a LOT of ads in each of the tabs - after all, Amazon wants you to buy a lot of stuff to help offset whatever the true cost of this unit is.

While the apps tab has all of your apps in the cloud or on the device, the games tab basically slices and dices the apps you have to be game specific - that's pretty handy and helps out quite a bit, especially if you have a lot of apps and want to sit down and play a game (although you still have to scroll away to find, say, a business app in the app tab).

What I think is a really nice new feature is the Audiobooks tab. Amazon of course gives you many opportunities in this tab to make purchases from their Audible subsidiary, but you also have a "Library" area where you can see your audiobooks that are stored either on the Cloud or on your Kindle Fire in the Device tab.

Reading Books:

When the Fire first came out, I preferred reading on my e-Ink Kindle and not at all on the Fire. That's because I think reading is easier on my eyes with the e-Ink version of Kindle, but I'm getting there! Turning pages is pretty darn easy - just tap the side of the screen to go to the next page or back a page, or you can swipe your finger across the screen to do the same.

Feature I wish this had?

The #1 thing would have to be a Bluetooth connectivity option. Of course, if I put this right next to my iPad there could be others such as the larger screen and a 3G or 4G connection option, but that's going to be in next month's release and I would call myself an iPad-lite user vs. an experienced pro so who knows what else I could be missing (life has been good so far, so I'm not complaining)? For $159, I feel like I am getting a lot already.

The #2 thing would be a plug / charger that connects to an electrical outlet vs. a USb port on your computer or a USB-compatible charging plug you may already own. I realize they had to cut things out to keep the cost down to $159, and luckily I - like many of you - have lots of these things laying around. First time buyers may not, but they might be in the minority.

Overall, at $159 this is not a great deal it is an outstanding deal. Kids will love it as they can read books, play games, watch TV and movies, and a whole lot of other things. Adults should like it for the exact same reasons, but while I try to minimize the amount of work-related stuff I do at home with the business apps that are available here in the Amazon App store and other places around the Internet I can also work on Excel and Word-compatible files when I have to without having to fire up my work laptop or whatever the case may be.