It’s been a couple of weeks since the Kindle Fire came out, giving people time to get past their first impressions and see how it actually works in practice. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has taken such a look at his family’s Kindle Fire, and determined that while it may be a “mediocre” general-purpose tablet, as a media viewer it does a few things very well.
Schonfeld reports that the Fire has become a favorite device in his family, with everyone trying to steal time on it. He goes over all of its major uses—reading, watching, listening, browsing, and playing—and concludes that the real attraction of the Fire is not the Fire itself, but the media it can bring to its owners.
People are not going to buy the Kindle Fire because of any of its specs. They are going to buy it because it eases them into the still-strange realm of digital books, movies, magazines, and apps. These are all media. The Fire makes it easy to find them and, more importantly, easy to pay for them. You hardly think twice about it.
It’s starting to look more and more like Amazon has a winning combination in the Fire and Prime. Its competitors are going to need to figure out how to match Amazon or else come up with their own competitive advantages.
You mentioned the Kindle Fire. The E Ink Kindles are excellent too. I bought a Kindle Touch and love it. The E Ink display is very readable in daylight. They have a nice feature that let’s me check books out of the library for free. For those readers interested in learning more, or wondering about the differences between all the different Kindle models, I posted info on the free library feature as well as a comparison of the different Kindle models. See: http://simplifymychoices.com/comparing-kindle-kindle-touch-kindle-keyboard-and-kindle-fire-ebook-readers/
Though the Kindle Fire is a hot product – for reading, the Kindle Touch is easier on the eyes, and the Fire needs a bit more time to work out the Android oddities on the operating system.
My wife and I love our new Kindle Fire. It’s lightweight, easy to use and has a great interface. The first thing I recommend anyone with a new Kindle do is install the nook app. We got our instructions from http://www.kindlemad.com through google.
It basically unlocks all the Android marketplace apps and unlocks the device. I am one very happy Kindle owner!
I love the new Kindle Fire too and the user interface is beautiful and stick, just that it’s not customizable as other Android Tablet.
Watching movies on it is Awesome!
When I do reading, I prefer reading on my Kindle 3 as it’s easier to eyes.
I have seen research that shows over 84% of tablet owners use them for entertainment, i.e. consume media. The Fire seem to make most of its customers very happy and they are not shy to publish their experiences in droves. Here is a link to the UGC analysis performed by Opinion Miner software comparing customer satisfaction of iPad2 and the Fire users with specific attributes of their experience – http://blog.amplifiedanalytics.com/2011/11/customer-experience-fire-vs-ipad-2/