Got a Kindle Fire this weekend and have to say, despite all the negative feedback, I’m impressed.
I own a 1G and 2G iPad and a Motorola Xoom so the tablet space isn’t new. But comparing the Kindle Fire to either of these is just not apples to apples. At $200 the Kindle Fire is a steal. You get an Android 2.3 customized UI by Amazon in a 7″ form factor.
The feel of it is nice, it feels just right for me. The Amazon UI is a bit too simple for me, but I was able to get it set up and working easy. The Amazon App store just doesn’t contain all the apps I want. So I ventured out to Root the Fire and install the Android Marketplace and various other apps.
Rooting it was easy, but it broke Amazon’s Instant Video. Unrooting or hiding the root solved this issue. Was able to get everything installed and I really like the performance now.
Battery life is good, not great, but good. The screen is bright and very readable. Movies looked really good, especially considering I compress mine to fit on iphones.
Streaming is what you are supposed to do with this thing, since its internal storage is about 6 gigs. So that means all your music has to be uploaded to Amazon cloud. This process sucked. The uploaded allows you to only choose albums, not artists or specific songs. I hated it so bad, I wanted google music back. So I installed google music and that worked so much better. Still, the google music uploader only allows you to upload playlists.
Ultimately, I am really enjoying this hackable Kindle Fire. Its been fun to play on it and hack around and see what the community does with it.