Driven by curiosity, I went ahead and preordered an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, which I’ve been using off and on for the last week.
Wiki-specific notes:
- Wikipedia (regular site) is on the default bookmarks, and displays nicely in the Silk browser (though the fundraising banners don’t quite fit in portrait layout!)
- Our in-progress Android app mostly runs fine, though the small-screen layout feels slightly wrong on this 7″ screen. Will benefit from a more tab-oriented interface that can use sidebars or such. ‘Near me’ geo search doesn’t work, as it relies on Google Maps APIs that aren’t present on this device.
I’ll leave super review details for dedicated reviewers, but here’s a few notes from me:
- customized UI mostly looks fairly polished, but has a few rough edges
- performance is middling. reading, web, video playback are acceptable enough. Some audio skipping when playing & downloading music simultaneously (boo!).
- battery life seems acceptable enough (not thoroughly tested, just using it intermittently)
- A few parts of the UI are actually very smoothly animated, such as the ‘cover flow’-like bookshelf on the home screen — however it’s not synchronized to vertical refresh, and there’s visible tearing. Points for near-60fps animation, but points off for the tearing.
- Silk browser seems pretty much like the stock Android browser with tabs. Disabling the server-assisted acceleration is easy in prefs.
- Kindle book reader looks and behaves pretty much like the stock Android Kindle app but with some customized menus. It also can view comics/graphic novels which don’t appear to be available on Android/iPhone/Cloud Reader yet. :(
- Built-in store stuff looks & works well; nicely designed to funnel all your money into Amazon. ;) They gave me a “free month” of Amazon Prime subscription, designed to get me used to streaming video, but I’ve already got Netflix, Apple, Comcast, and who knows what else available so who cares.
- Since the Fire lacks hardware back/home/menu buttons, it has a software toolbar which displays these, similar to the software buttons in Android 3 & 4. Unfortunately it’s poorly laid out, centering most of the buttons so they’re hard to reach with your thumbs while holding the device.
- Firefox runs, but isn’t yet available in the Amazon app store and the main download links herd you to the Android Market which isn’t there. There are manual download links which work though.
- the onscreen keyboard is very comfortable in portrait mode when holding the tablet with two hands; I can type with the thumbs, and it’s easier than on a tiny phone. In landscape mode however the keys are too widely stretched to reach the middle comfortably.
On the software freedom front: the Fire actually fares better than I expected. Like most Android devices it defaults to allowing only apps from ‘known sources’ to install (in this case, the Amazon App Store) but this can be flipped easily in preferences, and you can install .apk packages from direct download or USB transfer.
Hooking up to a computer for debugging over USB works but requires some tweaks to get the Android SDK to recognize it. This is the only way to do screenshots, since self-hosted screenshots weren’t added until Android 4.0 (grrrr! my fave little feature from iOS since the 2007 iPhone release).
As a practical matter, lack of access to Google’s Android Market is inconvenient; even many free apps haven’t set themselves up on the Amazon store and don’t offer direct downloads. Additional alternate app installers can be used as well though, such as F-Droid or the various custom markets folks have been using in some areas.
