From the beginning, Amazon's Kindle Fire was positioned as the budget tablet. Compared to the competition, rarely do the specs measure up. The one consistently redeeming virtue is the price. At $229 it retains some appeal despite its many drawbacks.
As expected, with the coming of the holiday season, so too comes Amazon's new shot at the brass ring. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX hit the market on October 18 followed by the larger 8.9-inch screen version in November. There are a couple interesting additions, such as the free Mayday feature, on this Android-based system.
If though you're looking for dramatic improvements in functions and capacity, you'll be disappointed. There's not a lot of enhancement with this third-generation model. Indeed, some might even think they're getting ripped off. The software here is based on Google's Android system, but absent all of Google's apps and services.
Instead, the new Kindle Fire owner has to download his or her apps from Amazon. (This includes, by the way, activating the Flash Player , which does not come activated, to the annoyance of many users.) The selection of apps is paltry in comparison to that available on the standard Android. We're talking around 85,000 apps compared to nearly a million for Android. Of course that also means you're missing a lot of stuff that many people value highly: e.g., Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
This brings us to another annoying feature of the Kindle Fire HDX, like its predecessor, its constantly trying to sell you goods from Amazon. If you hold your mouse over anything - app, book, video, whatever - your friendly Amazon salesman jumps up with a suggestion of something similar you should consider purchasing.
Admittedly this might be a matter of taste. Some people might quite like this relentless sales pitch. Especially given how skimpy the come-with goods are. For me, it's just too annoying. The catch here of course is that the marketing model is much like commercial television; this onslaught of sales pitches is the price you pay for the low sticker cost.
The good news is that the folks at Amazon have succeeded at reducing the rate of software bugs that caused so much trouble with previous models. It is much less glitchy. Also on the upside, it has an interesting design feature, which provides a "carousel" style view of apps, movies, books or whatever. These carousels provide a review of products or services that the Kindle user has recently accessed. There's a navigation bar at the bottom of the screen that provides access to the entire collection of content on the Kindle Fire.
Then there's that Mayday feature mentioned earlier. At the press of a button you get access to a live service rep, which appears in a corner of your screen. This rep can answer all your questions and actually take control of the tablet if that's a faster way to resolve difficulties than simply explaining how-to to the owner. This is a fairly cool thing and it is impressive that they've committed so heavily to customer service.
Yet, for all that, there's a kind of paradox, here. After all, one of the main selling features of these tablets is their intuitive qualities. They're supposed to be very high on the user friendliness scale. So all the effort and expense put into this live rep feature almost leaves me wondering if the poignant "Mayday" is meant less to evoke the user calling out to the rep than Amazon calling out Mayday to the market. They surrender: as in, okay, this is the best we can do, here's the workaround our inability to come up with a tablet that actually fulfilled the promise of intuitive function. Sorry. I know, I'm a cynical old dog.
The bottom line with this one, as with past versions, is that it's a good buy if your intention is to restrict your usage to Amazon products and services. If that's all you want to do, this product is certainly an improvement over earlier versions. If you're just looking to save money on a tablet, you can do better .
As expected, with the coming of the holiday season, so too comes Amazon's new shot at the brass ring. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX hit the market on October 18 followed by the larger 8.9-inch screen version in November. There are a couple interesting additions, such as the free Mayday feature, on this Android-based system.
If though you're looking for dramatic improvements in functions and capacity, you'll be disappointed. There's not a lot of enhancement with this third-generation model. Indeed, some might even think they're getting ripped off. The software here is based on Google's Android system, but absent all of Google's apps and services.
Instead, the new Kindle Fire owner has to download his or her apps from Amazon. (This includes, by the way, activating the Flash Player , which does not come activated, to the annoyance of many users.) The selection of apps is paltry in comparison to that available on the standard Android. We're talking around 85,000 apps compared to nearly a million for Android. Of course that also means you're missing a lot of stuff that many people value highly: e.g., Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
This brings us to another annoying feature of the Kindle Fire HDX, like its predecessor, its constantly trying to sell you goods from Amazon. If you hold your mouse over anything - app, book, video, whatever - your friendly Amazon salesman jumps up with a suggestion of something similar you should consider purchasing.
Admittedly this might be a matter of taste. Some people might quite like this relentless sales pitch. Especially given how skimpy the come-with goods are. For me, it's just too annoying. The catch here of course is that the marketing model is much like commercial television; this onslaught of sales pitches is the price you pay for the low sticker cost.
The good news is that the folks at Amazon have succeeded at reducing the rate of software bugs that caused so much trouble with previous models. It is much less glitchy. Also on the upside, it has an interesting design feature, which provides a "carousel" style view of apps, movies, books or whatever. These carousels provide a review of products or services that the Kindle user has recently accessed. There's a navigation bar at the bottom of the screen that provides access to the entire collection of content on the Kindle Fire.
Then there's that Mayday feature mentioned earlier. At the press of a button you get access to a live service rep, which appears in a corner of your screen. This rep can answer all your questions and actually take control of the tablet if that's a faster way to resolve difficulties than simply explaining how-to to the owner. This is a fairly cool thing and it is impressive that they've committed so heavily to customer service.
Yet, for all that, there's a kind of paradox, here. After all, one of the main selling features of these tablets is their intuitive qualities. They're supposed to be very high on the user friendliness scale. So all the effort and expense put into this live rep feature almost leaves me wondering if the poignant "Mayday" is meant less to evoke the user calling out to the rep than Amazon calling out Mayday to the market. They surrender: as in, okay, this is the best we can do, here's the workaround our inability to come up with a tablet that actually fulfilled the promise of intuitive function. Sorry. I know, I'm a cynical old dog.
The bottom line with this one, as with past versions, is that it's a good buy if your intention is to restrict your usage to Amazon products and services. If that's all you want to do, this product is certainly an improvement over earlier versions. If you're just looking to save money on a tablet, you can do better .
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