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The Kindle Fire is quite an achievement at $200. It's a perfectly usable tablet that feels good in the hand and has a respectably good looking display up front.

The Kindle Fire is one of a kind, at least this week. It's the first affordable, easy-to-use general-purpose tablet. It doesn't replace the Apple iPad: It complements the iPad, which is bigger, more powerful, more expensive, and has far more apps.

If you like what Amazon Prime has going on in the kitchen, the Fire is a terrific seat. It's not as powerful or capable as an iPad, but it's also a sliver of the price—and that $200 will let you jack into the Prime catalog (and the rest of your media collection) easily and comfortably.

The Kindle Fire isn't an iPad killer, but it is a killer deal. At $199, it's really hard to beat the package Amazon has put together. Assuming you're willing to carry a smaller 7-inch device, it combines an easy-to-use interface and one-tap access to loads of content in a well-built design.

The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it's a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish; if you're used to an iPad or "real" Android tablet, its software gremlins will drive you nuts.

In the world of tablets, there are great products and there are cheap products, but very few great, cheap products. ... for those of you unwilling to shell out $500 for an Apple iPad 2, and wary of buying a piece of junk, Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire tablet should be at the top of your wish list.

The best way to think of the Kindle Fire is as a decent e-reader that can do some extra stuff—namely, play videos and browse the Internet. For $200, that's not a bad deal—but just make sure that it's one you're willing to make.

iPad killer? No, the Kindle Fire is not. And it doesn't even match the iPad in web browsing, the one area in which its hardware should have sufficient performance to compete.

The Fire is a terrific media device, particularly for $199. Is it a halfway decent tablet computer as well? Mmm...probably not. Its user interface makes a clear statement about Amazon’s intentions. That said, it has a bunch of added features that makes it into much more than a reader.

You’ll have to pry the iPad 2 out of our cold dead hands, but we like the Kindle Fire enough to keep it around as an alternate option, which is more than we can say for almost all the other tablets we’ve used.

Now that it's approaching one year old, we struggle to recommend it over the new Google Nexus 7, which is a sexier tablet with a greater selection of apps, better screen and with greatly improved specs for the same price.