Kindle Fire. First impressions

Packaging is basic and simple. Not like Apple presentation. For $200 that’s fine.

The weighted feeling feels good. Like a solid product.

Plastic wrap around device is cheap feeling.

Has a look and feel to the Playbook

At first could not figure out how to turn it on. Ran fingers around edges. Then accidentally turned it on and saw the power lite up in green.

Screen is nice. Crips clear. Nice picture quality.

Feels intuitive. Got it connected to my home wifi.

Although it at first showed a log in screen, it logged me I to my amazon account. Cool and creepy.

Why do I need to wait for it to install latest features? It just arrived… Are there that many bug fixes or new software updates already??

Apple has a patent on the slide-to-unlock. Wonder if this will cause any stir for the Fire.

It’s amazingly fast. It opened one of my pre-purchased books immediately. Bam! Way better than iBooks. Better than Kindle itself. It’s on Fire!!

Newsstand looks interesting. Very easy, too easy, to buy an issue. I snagged the latest copy of Smithsonian… Ok, downloading is a different story (pardon the pun.) As with the iPad, these magazines are huge and take a long time to load. I hope they figure out how to stream in the future. Like, load as you read it. Otherwise, I’m not sure I really want to get back into reading magazines. It will be funny to see a large glossy rag on my 7in (cough cough) new Kindle Fire!

Okay, we’ll, that’s a big dissapointed my! It’s basically scanned pages into a small screen. I can’t read this. Ugh. Okay, no magazines for me thanks Kindle Fire.

MOVIES!!!! Although a small screen, the browsing experience is so much nicer than on the iPad with iTunes. It’s just more intuitive. Easy to look around. Love it!

APPS!!! In anticipation of the arrival of my new tech-gadget, I pre-selected some Android Apps from Amazon. They are magically all loaded! Maybe this is what was loaded when I impatiently first powered up my Fire…?

SCREEN

It’s smaller than the iPad, larger than my smart phone (iPhone 4S) – It’s large enough that in relation to watching a movie from a set across the room, it’s the same size. It’s bright, crisp, clear.

INTERFACE

Interesting… The auto-spell recommendation is like what I recently read about a hidden feature in iOS5.

The text typing and selection and correcting mechanism is not all that good. iOS5 has this beat. Yes, I’m comparing this to Apple’s tablet.

Netflix scrolling is weird. It pages up and down rather than a real scroll like in iPad app version. Not sure if I like it or not. And oddly, there is no hardware volume controls. And Netflix didn’t build in any into their interface. Very weird.

PRIME MEMBERSHIP

One of the benefits, other than quicker shipments, are FREE movies and books (ok, borrowing books is like getting them for free for a short period of time).

END THOUGHTS

Go get one. For $200 for the device, and $80 for Prime, you cant beat it. It’s fast, simple, easy to use, and works well. I have not played Angry Birds on it, yet… My needs are to watch movies, read books, and to be an adjunct to my iPad. I have enough love to give to both my tablet thingies.