My Kids Love My Kindle Fire

I like having the cool gadget-of-the-moment as much as the next guy, so I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire almost as soon as Amazon announced it.

I’ve been putting it through its paces for a few days and here’s my take:

• Personally, I love how the small 7” form factor fits comfortably and naturally in one hand, leaving the other free for swiping and gesturing. I read a lot and had some concerns about the screen size, but as others have noted, the screen is the same size as a trade paperback book and I had no trouble at all easily reading text on it. In fact, I’m halfway through a book I’ve read exclusively on the Fire (when I can pry out of my Kids’ hands – more on that below).
• The synchronization with my Kindle library. It’s very cool to open a book on the Fire and have it pick up at the exact spot I stopped reading the very same book on my iPad.
• The user interface. It’s clean, intuitive and very iPad-like (which is a good thing).
• Although the Fire’s hardware specs are lesser than the Nook tablet’s and most other tablets on the market, it’s performance is nice and snappy. No complaints there.

• No built-in calendar app. Yes I know there are a bunch of third-party calendar apps available in The Fire’s App store, but I would’ve MUCH rather had a built-in calendar app than say, the useless IMDB app.
• No true Facebook app. The Facebook “app” that ships with the device merely forwards you to the mobile version of Facebook.com. I would’ve thought that securing an impressive native FB app would have been among the very first things on the project team’s Todo list.
• While it connects to secured Wifi networks flawlessly when it has the password or key, the device has had trouble connecting to many unsecured Wifi hotspots, especially those that require a confirmation click to access.
• No external media slot. C’mon Amazon. I get how leaving one out was an intentional strategy to promote use of Amazon’s cloud-based storage, but I’ve already encountered a half-dozen scenarios where a media card would have been ideal.

• I desperately miss having a physical button to click to jump back to the home screen. On the Fire it almost always takes several gestures to accomplish this.
• I don’t care for Pulse, the feed reader that ships with the device. The interface is not intuitive at all and I can only imagine the struggles that non-technical users–most of whom have no idea what an RSS “feed” is–will have with it. I ended up preferring to just using Google Reader normally through the built-in Silk browser, which worked fine.
• The allegedly revolutionary Silk browser doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. I understand the split-browsing happening in the background while in Cloud mode (and the concomitant privacy issues), but from a user’s perspective it’s just another browser that displays web pages. In fact, given the browser is closed source and doesn’t allow plugins, I view it as more of a devolution than an evolution.

Almost from the moment I unboxed the device, my daughters were drawn to it. The size of it made them think it was a device for children. It fit easily in their hands and played back their favorite Ruff Ruffman videos smoothly and without a hitch. Within 2 hours they were both asking for their own units. That never happened with my iPad, no matter how many Princess apps I installed on it.

Therefore, the Kindle Fire is a hit mostly a disappointment in the Cato household. (See update below.)

Update: It turns out the Fire has quite a few bugs and several of my kid’s favorite websites do not function well on the device (but work flawlessly on my iPad.) Oh well.