Kindle Fire - want one!

[Slinky]

One of my coworkers got his Kindle Fire today. He brought it in, and he let me play with it. It felt quite snappy. The UI uses a coverflow for the books, magazines, and movies. There is only one physical button that I could see, and that was the on-off switch. The one big question I had was about reading text books on this thing. It does just fine in this department. Amazon cleaned up the Android UI quite a bit. They did a lot of decluttering. It was fairly easy to hold in one hand, even with my very small hands (I can't palm a basketball).

The one thing that I found confusing was that there is no home button on the device. It is all done in software. All the apps I tried had a home icon on the bottom left. It was smooth sailing once I figured one out. I now know what I want for Christmas. 

[The Gorn]

This week my wife and I looked at what I *think* was a Kindle Fire, at Wal-Mart.

Basically, I saw dead people. 

No internet access to any of the tablet devices they were displaying, and no power to the Kindle.

Pretty stupid of them.

[pxsant]

Before you buy the Fire, take a look at the B&N Nook Tablet.  It costs $50 more but has more features - double the memory and storage, it can accept micro SD cards and longer battery life.

Aside from that, I will not buy the Amazon tablet simply because Amazon gave in to Microsoft's Android patent threats.  I absolutely will not subsidize Microsoft in any way.

[The Gorn]

I think I played with a Nook at a Barnes and Noble a few nights ago. I was *really* impressed. The store had the wifi working for it, and the demonstrator was fully functional. It felt nice in the hands and the screen reading was intuitively obvious. I liked the wide silver border it has.

[pxsant]

Here is a review of the Nook tablet.

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/17/8857950-nook-tablet-review-great-hardware-stiff-competition

[The Gorn]

Most of the reviews of Nook I have seen cast this as a probable VHS vs. Betamax thing. (Nook being the eventual Betamax.)

The Kindle Fire's specs look a bit lame compared to the Nook. (IE, no flash card port, poorer battery life.)

I need to do more product research if Santa at our house is being pressured to get one of these things.

[pxsant]

Most of the reviews on the Fire have been positive.   Here is one review by the Instapaper guy.  He does not like the Fire much.  His final comment "If I didn’t need the Fire for Instapaper testing, I’d return it."

http://www.marco.org/2011/11/17/kindle-fire-review