Kindle Fire..Anyone Else.

My wife & I really like it. I'm still testing all of the features.

I'll have to root it tonight for some good times. :D
 
I dont have one....yet, but i will at some point. Between being sick and being off work for weeks because of surgery finances wont allow iit right now. but it is at the top of my want to buy list.
 
Ours just arrived today, pretty fun device so far. Still playing around with it as we've had it exactly an hour. :p We have a ton of kindle books and amazon prime, plus it allows for netflix and hulu plus streaming. Good stuff
 
Put in an order last night. Who knows when it will arrive, hopefully before my wife's trip to Philly in early Dec.

Oldie said:
You see that's just the thing, I don't see these as competing products in any way. If anything, having cheaper lower featured products similar to the ipad available is a good thing. It gets people interested in the medium who would never consider plunking down $600 for an ipad. After they have some experience though and figure out how much they like tablets, they may be willing to invest more for a higher quality one.
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I agree. So many of the reviews want to compare it to an ipad. Yes they are both "tablets" but a Civic and a Corvette are both cars. The significantly lower price and different (or lack of) feature set on the Fire put it between your phone and an ipad. It's an e-reader with additional media features tied into the Amazon content catalog. Apple didn't lose a customer when I bought the Fire- I was never even considering an ipad. Compare it to the Nook and call it a day.
 
I was thinking of getting my two nieces one Fire to share amongst themselves for Xmas but the lack of microSD is a killer. I was going to let them use my Prime account to watch free video's.

Nook Tablet seems better but they don't have the media content as Amazon does. Difficult decision to make.
 
If you've got some time wait and see if there's a apk out for prime videos soon. I'm betting there will be, but I'm also betting Amazon will take steps to fight it until they decide if they want to keep it a kindle exclusive feature (my bet would be they'll end up releasing an official sooner or later).
 
Majority of people who use an iPad don't do anything more than movies/music/FB/games. Sure there are a ton more apps and games and its cooler, but that's about it. A Fire/Nook will serve their needs just as well for much cheaper. So there absolutely is competition between the 2 segments.

There are many people who were never potential Apple customers due to the price. There are many more who were saving to buy one, or realize that a Fire is just as good for their needs. You can get 2 Fire's and still have $100 left over for content.

I'm sure Apple is worried, there is talk of a 7" iPad next year for $300.
 
MrCrispy said:
I'm sure Apple is worried, there is talk of a 7" iPad next year for $300.
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Maybe. Amazon's model is different than Apple's. They're selling the device at break even/loss in order to drive Prime subscriptions and digital media sales, like a video game console. Apple doesn't do this. If they can't make profit off the device itself, they won't sell it. They have a habit of just relinquishing market segments when they can't make enough profit there anymore. If the only way to make a 7" tablet competitive is to make it at a loss, you won't see one from Apple.
 
After six hours with mine I'm very pleased. The UI isn't as snappy as my phone (Samsung Focus) but it's very stable. No crashes or app closures. And it literally took less than two minutes to get up and running.

I think AMZN is going to sell a boatload of these over the holidays.
 
Mine just came in. I like the looks, weight and feel of it. Screen seems solid. Viewing angles are acceptable. I was worried Amazon might have skimped on the screen, but for $200 you can't complain. It's not as good as my phone, but it's a hell of alot bigger, so...

I really wish the Kindle Fire came bundled with a carrying pouch (cheap neoprene would do). The boxing is barebones. No manual, just the unit and its AC adapter. That's it. Have to remind myself Amazon is selling these at a loss as it is.
 
For those wondering about space...Downloaded a 2 hr 4min movie from my Amazon library to the Kindle Fire, 589MB, 480p. (not HD)
 
Well, mine came in finally this afternoon and I love it!


I am floored at how snappy the ui is and how well integrated everything is. The setup is dead simple, viewing angles excellent, experience is tailored nicely, and size plus weight very nice. I can easily read it with one hand, or browse the web and thumbtype quickly in landscape. Browser is tabbed as well, and quick even with the amazon accelerator disabled. I am blown away compared to what I was expecting. The only complaint I have is that the unit is slippery despite being rubberized. I have my cases on order so that should fix it for me at least.

Question.... how can I disable word suggestions and auto correct in the browser? I disabled them in the settings for the Kindle but they persist in the browser regardless. I actually like the suggestions but not the auto correct....
 
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MrCrispy said:
Majority of people who use an iPad don't do anything more than movies/music/FB/games.
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So by that argument it would be better to just not get the iPad or the Fire and stick with a smartphone. Since that's all anyone does with a smartphone (with the added ability of making calls/texting). Hell the phone probably has 3G and a data plan, so it's miles above what the Kindle is offering. The only real difference here is the screen size.

But people aren't just sticking with the cellphone, nor is that a very fair comparison. My experience with a 7" tablet was structured exactly like Oldie stated, I used it and loved it but it got me interested in a larger device. I still use my nook color today (though mainly as a companion/Hitch Hikers Guide for when I am playing Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind or X3:TC).

I think the Fire is great for getting people interested in tablets, it's at a price point that makes a lot of people that weren't considering one take another look. But I also think that once a lot of these people are on the bandwagon, they'll pick up an ipad/galaxy tab/transformer prime and like the larger one a lot more. It's a gateway device, then they get really hooked on the larger ones.

You're also forgetting that Apple is Apple. If there's one thing they do really well it's sell products at a significant mark up to their competitors.
 
Question re: the Fire (I think I know the answer already, but just to check ...). Is there any way to configure a VPN connection on the device itself, or will I need to set my VPN up at the wireless level?
 
Well, I just posted my review on Amazon. Keep in mind being made for Amazon I kept the tech level dumbed-down for general-public consumption, but it's an accurate reflection of my thoughts:

GoldenTiger said:
I just received my two ordered Kindle Fire tablets, and am quite pleased.

PROS:

-UI is very snappy and responsive

-Size is perfect for one-handed portrait reading or two-handed landscape web browsing and typing.

-Screen is extremely high quality thanks to the IPS display, with flawless viewing angles and excellent color.

-Setup was dead simple: enter router/wifi settings, automatic update of software done by the Fire, then enter Amazon password and you're off!

-The software integrates your content as well as Amazon's in a great, pleasant-to-use fashion.

-Weight is very light.

-Web browser has tabs, making browsing multiple pages with some the background easy!

-Software is rock-solid stable... no crashes, errors, or glitches in around 7-8 straight hours of use today while setting it up and exploring what it has to offer.

-There is already a root mod available on XDA.

-1024x600 resolution has better DPI (dots per inch) than the iPad, and looks fantastic on a 7" screen.

-Battery life is strong... 20% left after fully charging and having used it for about 7 and a half hours nearly straight once fully charged with mixed web browsing, gaming, and video watching through Prime streaming.

CONS:

-The rubberized backing is very slippery at first, but after using it for several hours now it seems to be becoming more "grippy" and not sliding from my hands. I have a case on order which hopefully will alleviate any remaining issues at that point.

-Screen size is a scrap small at times for web browsing, though in general I prefer it to my 10" Asus Transformer for most tasks.

-"Frustration-free" packaging requires you to tear it to open... very strange!

-Audio quality from built-in speakers lacks bass; however, this is expected for a tablet, and overall the quality is better than I expected.

------------

Overall, I'm very impressed. I was keeping my expectations relatively low due to the somewhat mediocre previews, but I am encountering none of the quibbles they had with it. Perhaps the day-1 software update I mentioned above is partly to thank for that, but the shipping units are great.

To touch on the storage "issue" people keep bringing up... in all practicality, it's not an issue at all. Considering a video encoded for these sizes of screens is about 800mb to 1gb and is 1hr 45m to two hours long, even if you're taking a round-the-world plane ride you can fit 4-5 movies, hundreds of songs, and hundreds of books all on local storage. If your plane were to have wifi access you could browse the web as well. Barring that rare circumstance, for virtually everyone else it is plenty to be able to carry that amount of content with you and access the web through your cell phone.

I really can't stress enough how well Amazon's team pulled this off: the Kindle Fire user interface is extremely intuitive and well-designed. I am a programmer by trade and build my own PC's, and find it fine. A relative of mine who is a computer neophyte found it fairly easy to use, with little guidance needed from me as she played around with her Fire.

The bottom line is, this thing does and performs 90-95% of what any other tablet could. Price aside, even though it's extremely inexpensive for a tablet at $200, it is a fantastic product. Sure, it lacks rarely-used features such as a "front-facing camera" for video chat, and can't hold fifty hours of video, but... truth be told, do you really need to be able to video chat off of your tablet? Do you really need to have multiple, non-stop days worth of content on your tablet to watch at one time? Considering the streaming video and the overall capability to store a few movies plus hundreds of songs plus hundreds of books plus your apps/games, I'm really having trouble thinking of a scenario you could "run out" of content other than being stranded on a desert island for a month. The Kindle Fire does everything virtually all users, with few exceptions, could want or need, and at a fraction of the price. Heck, with the current price point you could buy this tablet/reader PLUS an Asus Transformer on sale or other similar 10" tablet, all for around the same pricing as the base iPad 2 model ($499 + tax/shipping, Apple stuff rarely goes on sale).

RATING: 5/5
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Bomo said:
So by that argument it would be better to just not get the iPad or the Fire and stick with a smartphone. Since that's all anyone does with a smartphone (with the added ability of making calls/texting). Hell the phone probably has 3G and a data plan, so it's miles above what the Kindle is offering. The only real difference here is the screen size.

But people aren't just sticking with the cellphone, nor is that a very fair comparison. My experience with a 7" tablet was structured exactly like Oldie stated, I used it and loved it but it got me interested in a larger device. I still use my nook color today (though mainly as a companion/Hitch Hikers Guide for when I am playing Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind or X3:TC).

I think the Fire is great for getting people interested in tablets, it's at a price point that makes a lot of people that weren't considering one take another look. But I also think that once a lot of these people are on the bandwagon, they'll pick up an ipad/galaxy tab/transformer prime and like the larger one a lot more. It's a gateway device, then they get really hooked on the larger ones.

You're also forgetting that Apple is Apple. If there's one thing they do really well it's sell products at a significant mark up to their competitors.
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Maybe. You can't really compare a smartphone to a tablet since they are usually tied to a contract and are much smaller. But 7" is a decent enough size (that's what she said :)) and not everybody will be able to upgrade. Which is why the Fire will sell a lot, its the perfect combination of features, content and price.
 
I carry this to work now instead of my Ipad. For me the size is just great. The one problem I encountered....I downloaded a magazine just to see how it would look and you cant zoom in on the page, or change the font size. Somehow doesnt make sense.

EDIT. Ok , downloaded Architectural Digest and the zooming feature worked.
 
Can anyone provide me with a zipped copy of adbd from /sbin on the Kindle Fire? I jacked mine up by accident with SuperOneClick, so I'm attempting to fix it manually. I would greatly appreciate if anyone can provide this. If anyone could also provide a rooted copy as well. Thanks. :)
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Can anyone provide me with a zipped copy of adbd from /sbin on the Kindle Fire? I jacked mine up by accident with SuperOneClick, so I'm attempting to fix it manually. I would greatly appreciate if anyone can provide this. If anyone could also provide a rooted copy as well. Thanks. :)
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I should be able to grab the stock adbd from mine if you still need it by the time you read this, PM me if so. I don't have a rooted one offhand as I haven't toyed with that at all on mine. You may have more success with that over at XDA.
 
BladeVenom said:
That would be funny, after all the bad things Steve Jobs said about 7" tablets.
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Indeed it would be. I think the iPad is going to have a price sustainability problem, I think there's going to have to be cheaper versions than $500 before too long, especially as decent x86 Windows 8 tablets come on line.
 
I finally got to open mine up and play with it. So far I am really impressed. The interface is really nice and runs smoothly. It was really cool to see that all my amazon purchased content was available as soon as I connected it to WiFi. The screen is beautiful and text looks razor sharp. Games and web look great too.

Overall I could not be happier with a $200 tablet. I did have one issue where it rebooted when loading an Amazon video purchase, but it has not happened since.
 
Yeah, picked up an open box Kindle Fire for $149 at Best Buy Thurs Afternoon, looked brand new to me. Not sure what the story on it was.

I've since rooted the device then added Android Market Place and then installed Go Launcher Ex to run as my front-end.

Pretty damn sweet. Seems a bit heavy. Plays video fine, games smooth. My only complaint is the sound seems a bit low at max setting in most situations. I need to figure out how to go in and change this setting somehow. It's practically useless to me. At max setting, the sound is hard to hear. At the 1/2 way setting I can't even hear anything. Something is wrong.

I read on Amazon that a lot of people are having this problem. You would expect that at 50% volume setting you would get 1/2 the volume of it at 100%, well, you don't. You get nothing.
 
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Have any of you had a chance to compare the fire to the nook tablet? I was very impressed with the nook tablets web browsing and overall speed. Trying to talk myself out of upgrading from my nook color but its hard.
 
I actually wanted to take my KFire back to Best Buy and get the Nook Tablet but it wasn't in stock yet. I've since decided to hang on to the Kfire.

The KFire does have a faster GPU in it from what I've been able to research. Sure you get 16gig internal ram an expansion port but to be honest, 8gig + Cloud + Streaming is a lot of storage. If I had both in front of me I could of course give you the X vs. X comparison you're wanting, but can't at the moment. There are tons of those on Youtube however.
 
BladeVenom said:
That would be funny, after all the bad things Steve Jobs said about 7" tablets.
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Jobs often had no clue about technology. e.g. he wanted the iPhone not to run any apps (which is how the 1st iPhone was) and it was only after everyone else disagreed with him and had to convince him that the AppStore (and thus success) was born. Also Apple lies about everything right upto the point they release their own competitor. Trust me, it'll happen again when iPhone gets a bigger screen :)
 
J Macker said:
Will it play 1080p content smoothly? How does it look? I'm interested if the picture quality after the downscaling and smooth playback. How about sound?
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All have 1024x600 screens. I was hoping somehow the Nook Tablet had a true 1080p display. I guess the size prevents it using a standard IPS screen.

As for picture quality, engadget says the Nook TABLET is better than the Fire (or the Nook Color I presume). Nook TABLET is on right and see the slightly better detail, esp. in the tie pattern?

kindle-nook-ruffalo.jpg


http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/11/kindle-nook-ruffalo.jpg



FYI - The Nook Color is only $170 at Target right now ($200 w/ $30 gift card)
 
MrCrispy said:
Jobs often had no clue about technology. e.g. he wanted the iPhone not to run any apps (which is how the 1st iPhone was) and it was only after everyone else disagreed with him and had to convince him that the AppStore (and thus success) was born. Also Apple lies about everything right upto the point they release their own competitor. Trust me, it'll happen again when iPhone gets a bigger screen :)
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An opinion about tablet size has zero to do with technology...it's about preference.
 
So...after a week of use I'm in love with this device. I have completely stopped taking my Ipad around with me. At work, I have my Fire on the desk . I use PULSE to keep up with all my tech related news. I use it for my email and I use it for web browsing. This morning I downloaded a movie on it and took it to the gym. Did cardio while watching. If fits in my coat pocket. It also finds my Nexus S wifi hot spot right away. So far I cant say enough about how much I love this.
 
Got ours last week. Initial impressions are really good; it's a cool little machine. Surfing the web, reading magazines, using IMDB while watching TV / movies.....it's all good.

It seems to do everything I wanted it to do. It's really snappy and the UI is very intuitive. For the price, I'm really digging it.....:cool:
 
I just got two Fire's from my sister-in-law. She wants me to get them both up and running with movies for our trip out of the country in two weeks. So... I get to play with them! Hoping I can get my movies playing on them without much hassle.
 
Rustynuts said:
All have 1024x600 screens. I was hoping somehow the Nook Tablet had a true 1080p display. I guess the size prevents it using a standard IPS screen.
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Yeah, I'm aware that they can't actually display 1080p, but I was wondering if the Fire or Nook could play a 1080p and downscale on the fly. I really don't want to be forced to store two copies of movies in different resolutions.

Raekwon said:
I just got two Fire's from my sister-in-law. She wants me to get them both up and running with movies for our trip out of the country in two weeks. So... I get to play with them! Hoping I can get my movies playing on them without much hassle.
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Please post back when you do. How will you store the movies on the Fire? On a roadtrip without wifi and no memory card slot, I don't understand how you could have more than one movie on the device.
 
J Macker said:
Please post back when you do. How will you store the movies on the Fire? On a roadtrip without wifi and no memory card slot, I don't understand how you could have more than one movie on the device.
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I have about 8 movies on my fire now, none of them bought from Amazon either. I just took my personal videos and re-encoded them for the device. My source files were 720p ~4GB MKV's and knocking them down for the 7 inch screen (1024x600) took them to between 220mb and 330mb files that look quite nice.

Obviously if you go loading full 1080p videos on there you're not even going to fit one, I would guess you could fit a single 720, but that's asking it to push a lot of data it doesn't need to.
 
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J Macker said:
Yeah, I'm aware that they can't actually display 1080p, but I was wondering if the Fire or Nook could play a 1080p and downscale on the fly. I really don't want to be forced to store two copies of movies in different resolutions.
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In pretty much every discussion I've seen on the subject for any Android device, playback of 1080P files even on a less than 1080P screen doesn't work well, especially for higher quality encoded files and considering the limited storage on the Fire its even more of an issue. An hour TV show recorded in Windows Media Center from a 1080i broadcast would only fit on an empty Fire with almost nothing else on it.
 
Oh, and for the record, there were some reports that MP4's encoded with h.264 codecs wouldn't play, but that's how I did all of mine and they're fine. I used handbrake for a few and AVS for the rest, both worked fine.
 
Here's a sample MP4 if you want to take a look. I'm working on side cropping to get the aspect ratio just right and I don't have it nailed quite yet, so this is very slightly stretched. Should have it adjusted almost perfectly soon.

Captain America Sample it's ~5mb.

Oh...and if you're just looking to stream, make them as big as your transfer from your network to your kindle can handle and they stream just fine through ES File Explorer
 
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I've decided that I love my KFire so much that ... I have to return it for the Nook Tablet. I really need the 16gig and expansion slot. Just no way around it. I've yet to have a boring shit since I've got the damn thing.
 
I transferred the mp4 movies i've encoded using handbrake for my epic and they played fine in the gallery. They looked very good, while not being encoded specifically for the Fire.
 
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