gdgt

I've only had the Kindle Fire for a few hours now and have been putting the device through its paces. Installing apps, visiting websites, reading, watching video, basically putting it through its paces. Here are my first impressions on the Kindle Fire.

Hardware and design

When designing a device as low cost, at $200, and high end as the Kindle Fire trade offs had to be made. The only modes of communication with the device is via WiFi and an indescriminately positioned microUSB slot at the bottom of the device, sandwiched in between a 3.5mm headphone jack and the sole hardware button, a power button. There's no GPS, no bluetooth and no 3G radios to be found. It's as simple as you can get. If you're looking for any of these things, then I'd suggest you skip the Kindle Fire. If Amazon's key principle was to have the device disappear during use, then they've accomplished it. The device is a thin black slate with a flat rubberized back, topped off with two speakers on top. It's as simple as you can get.

However, what you'll instantly notice is the density of the device. Amazon has the listed weight of the device just shy of a pound, but in use, it just feels heavier. For extended use, I found that I had to lie it on a flat surface or use two hands. For you one-handed use afionadios, you'll definitely notice the weight after a few minutes (unless you're more manly than me). Even if you find the strength to hold it for one hand use, the combination of the blockiness and glossy front will make it difficult to find a comfortable way to balance it with one hand.

The sound from the speakers are decent. However, holding it horizontally will make the sound output in only one direction (depending on how you're holding it).

As for storage, there's a paltry 8GB with no memory slot expansion in sight. Amazon's hoping you rely on their streaming services to get you through the day. A media hog's device this is not.

Software

As for the software. Thankfully, aside from the Amazon apps, there's not much stock software on the device. Unfortunately, the non-Amazon ones they do have aren't removable. I've tried LauncherPro and it just crashes, so if you're thinking of switching out the default launcher, you'll have to wait until the hackers have at it. You'll have a selection of more than 10,000 apps to choose from in Amazon's app store with the ability to side-load apps at your liesure. This seems small in comparison to the 350,000+ apps found on Google's Market, but you'll find a higher ratio of high quality apps.

Purchasing apps is pretty quick and painless. If you've already use the appstore on your Android device, then it's no different here. If you don't like that, then you won't care for the Kindle Fire variant. One small issue, hitting the "install" button takes you to the app store page and then installs the app. It'd be nice if it doesn't take you away from the list you're viewing.

The quality of Amazon video streaming is ok (it's grainy at times); the selection is even worse. Hulu Plus video look better with less grain. I don't have a Netflix account, so I couldn't test that. If you're thinking this will replace Netflix, then unicorns are real. Amazon does supply apps for both Hulu Plus and Netflix.

I use Amazon's Cloud player for my audio needs and I'm happy to say it works wonderfully. You can download your MP3's directly onto the device (limited by the amount of storage you have left) for offline use directly from Amazon, you choose to download your content per playlist, per artist, per album or per song.

The Kindle reading app if what you'd expect from Amazon. It works well for what it displays with multi-device syncing faciliated by WhisperSync. Page swiping animations could be better though, but it works well enough displaying text with its relatively high res display.

The browser is kinda disappointing, within an hour of getting the device I managed to crash the device by playing an HTML5 video. It's stuttery and janky. If you're visiting an image heavy site, then scrolling slows to a crawl. This happens even when I had plugins set to "on demand" where flash content won't load unless I tell tap on the content. Amazon's touting that their silk browser does some server side offloading and pre-caching of content to speed up browsing, but I haven't really noticed any speed increases. I'll have to give it a try on 3G to really see how it handles slower speeds.

As of right now, I'd definitely recommend the Kindle Fire to all Prime members that don't already have an iPad. It's cheap enough to not feel like you're making a steep investment and the device itself feels extremely solid. It's also the only tablet (that I'm aware of) that has the ability to play Amazon videos.

If anyone has questions, feel free to send them my way or check out Engadget's Tim Stevens' thread here:

gdgt.com­/discuss­/any­-questions­-about­-the­-kindle­-fi...

I'll post a more thorough review once I get more time with this.