Kindle Fire Review

Amazon caused quite a sensation in the summer of 2011 when they announced the upcoming release of a new 7 in. tablet with an 8 hour battery life that would run on a customized version of Android and cost a bit less than $200. When the final specifications were revealed the interest reached fever pitch as it was very similar to the iPad 2 with a 1 GHz dual-core processor and 512 MB RAM. Nonetheless closer inspection and usage of the Kindle Fire shows that a long way from being an iPad 2 killer, the Kindle Fire fulfills a totally different role.

The first thing you might notice when reading through the Kindle Fire specs is the absence of a lot of the hardware which is common-place even on smartphones nowadays. You will not find a camera, microphone, GPS, compass or a 3G chip so what you can do with the Kindle Fire is somewhat limited. Amazon has even cut off access to the Android Market place so you can only download approved applications from the Kindle Store but before you balk at the idea, the Kindle Store has 16,000 apps available to download including all the hottest tools, resources, office applications and games that you'll find on the Android Marketplace.

What Amazon has done is create a fascinating hand-held tablet that leverages its vast media library to become the ultimate consumption device. The Kindle Fire isn't built to be a creative tablet like the Samsung Galaxy or the Apple iPad 2, it's engineered to do one thing which is to make it as straightforward as feasible to access Amazon's database of movies, TV shows, ebooks, apps and music. To this end, Amazon even sells the Fire at a total loss as it knows it will make up the cost in the long term which goes some way towards explaining the phenomenal retail price.

So the Kindle Fire is a media consumption device then, what does that imply? To start, with Amazon Prime (you get a totally free month subscription when you buy the device - read more) you get unrestricted, unlimited access to over 100,000 movies and television shows. You can view them whenever you want, as many times as you would like. By using your WiFi connection the Fire will stream the content directly to your device.

You'll also recieve access to Amazon's Cloud Storage. What this means is that you can upload all of the media content that you already own like MP3's, movies and ebooks and then access it from anywhere using your Kindle Fire (assuming there is a Wi Fi connection). You don't have to drag around an external hard drive anymore because everything is stored and is accessible from the Internet.

Although the Kindle Fire is designed as a consumption device that doesn't suggest that you can not utilize it for some productivity purposes, for instance you can very easily use it to manage your emails, you can view reports, spreadsheets and presentations using one of the many office applications that are available and you can use it to update your internet-based calendar.

The Android interface has been completely overhauled by Amazon and it looks pretty slick, although compared with the finesse of the iPad 2 interface the Kindle Fire isn't quite there yet. It's quite zippy to navigate around, but again, if you are used to the iPad 2 you'll see a lot of difference.

At only $200 for such a dynamic gadget which gives you access to so much content the Kindle Fire is going to be one of the must have pieces of equipment for 2012.

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