Amazon's Kindle Fire from the start has been situated as the budget tablet. Its specs rarely are found to measure up to those of its competitors, but the price, the current edition offered at $229, is so appealing it has managed to leverage a spot in the market.
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.
However, anyone hopeful of major upgrades of functions and capacity will find little to cheer about here. Not only is there little in the way of quality upgrades, but some are going to wind up feeling a bit cheated. While the system is based on Google's Android, it's kind of the poor man's Android, lacking Google's popular 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.
I find this immensely annoying and distracting. Obviously, it's a matter of personal taste. Some folks, I expect, find real value in this endless exposure to new product opportunities. For me, it just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do. Like commercial television, though, this is the monetizing strategy: you suffer through the ads to get the product at such a low price.
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.
And let us not forget what some people might find the coolest feature of all. At the press of a button this Kindle Fire version provides you the Mayday service, in which you are immediately hooked up with a live service representative. The rep appears in a corner of your tablet's screen and addresses any problems or concerns you have. And your little corner friend, who you'll know on a first name bases, can even take control of your Kindle Fire, should that prove the most efficient manner of resolving your issue. There's no question this is a cool feature and the commitment to customer service makes a statement
The irony of course is that the whole idea of such tablets is that they are supposed to be highly user friendly, operating in intuitive ways. So, one can't help wondering if there isn't a certain kind of confession in the provision of this service. "Well, we couldn't quite get it right, but here's our workaround." Or, maybe I'm just too cynical.
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.
However, anyone hopeful of major upgrades of functions and capacity will find little to cheer about here. Not only is there little in the way of quality upgrades, but some are going to wind up feeling a bit cheated. While the system is based on Google's Android, it's kind of the poor man's Android, lacking Google's popular 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.
I find this immensely annoying and distracting. Obviously, it's a matter of personal taste. Some folks, I expect, find real value in this endless exposure to new product opportunities. For me, it just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do. Like commercial television, though, this is the monetizing strategy: you suffer through the ads to get the product at such a low price.
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.
And let us not forget what some people might find the coolest feature of all. At the press of a button this Kindle Fire version provides you the Mayday service, in which you are immediately hooked up with a live service representative. The rep appears in a corner of your tablet's screen and addresses any problems or concerns you have. And your little corner friend, who you'll know on a first name bases, can even take control of your Kindle Fire, should that prove the most efficient manner of resolving your issue. There's no question this is a cool feature and the commitment to customer service makes a statement
The irony of course is that the whole idea of such tablets is that they are supposed to be highly user friendly, operating in intuitive ways. So, one can't help wondering if there isn't a certain kind of confession in the provision of this service. "Well, we couldn't quite get it right, but here's our workaround." Or, maybe I'm just too cynical.
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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