The Unofficial Blog Kindle has a article about the owner’s Kindle Fire six months on:
Durability has held up well. While initial tests, such as that done by Andrei, indicated that the Kindle Fire’s screen was almost humorously scratch-resistant it is always good to see that sort of thing last. The majority of Kindle Fireowners I have come into contact with indicate that their devices are in roughly the same shape today that they were when first unboxed.
The Kindle Fire’s Android fork has remained relatively successful. Amazon’s Appstore for Android is still home to slightly less than 10% as many titles as Google Play, but more developers seem to be deciding that it might be worth jumping through some of Amazon’s hoops to get to a store that is more likely to attract customers to a given product and that can be trusted to reliably pay developers for those sales. Google’s selection might be better and their update process more streamlined, but none of that matters if they continue to offer the lowest return on investment of any major app store.
I left a comment there about 45 minutes ago that’s awaiting moderation and I’ll post it here also.
‘ Matthew,
Re your “After the … there has been nothing good enough to be worth noting.”
In my view, the Reading View for web-article reading is done VERY well, and it’s brought me back to Silk from Dolphin HD which I far preferred almost right away until Amazon’s Reading View feature was added. It makes a huge difference for most who use the web browser on a 7″ tablet if they know about it (and that’s the key). For those who don’t, look for the reading glasses icon in the bottom status bar when at a web page article.
I like using that despite the fact that a double tap will usually raise the font far enough and wrap the web article text within the width of the KFire, depending on your web settings. But Reading View is much easier and very effective. No other tablet browser has it. It’s like Readability, getting rid of ads and side boxes while supporting article links. ‘
I’m a bigtime Amazon supporter, and have loved my Kindles. But the Fire has left a little to be desired, for me, as a reader, of all things. It excels at everything else, but six months in, we have no collections for organization; no page numbers; no universal search. It’s hard for me to believe that they couldn’t come up with these things in all this time. Really they should have been there at launch, since Amazon had seen how important the first two were to readers. I also get a lot of crashes in books, though I haven’t heard this from other Fire owners. I think the root problem is that Kindle took over an Android reading app and adapted it, rather than producing their own as they had done. I love the eInk and the features of my old Kindles, so I continue to go back to them for serious reading. The future of a tablet reader is things like magazines. Those of us who read novels will always love eInk.
Andrys, Safari on iPad has a “Reader” button in the address bar. I agree with you that this feature is indispensable on a tablet. It gets rid of the clutter and distractions.