- If you strictly want to read e-books, you're better off with an
e-ink Kindle. Reading on an LCD is still annoying, and the Kindle
application is choppy.
- It's pretty great as a streaming media player, as long as you have
a Netflix account or an Amazon Prime membership, or both. You can't
cache either of those offline, though, which means it's not great
away from wifi.
- The music player is fine, but I'm completely spoiled by Zune Pass,
and I don't really need yet another device that plays MP3s.
- Belle doesn't like the speakers much. I think if we were meant to
listen through speakers, God wouldn't have given us good noise-blocking
headphones.
- I don't have any experience with other tablets, nor do I
particularly think there's anything earth-shattering about the
idea of a tablet, so I'm the wrong person to ask whether it's a
good fit within that niche.
- That said, if you're looking for a cheap Android tablet, I'm not
aware of anything better than the Fire for the price.
- As soon as someone releases a decent launcher that doesn't crash
instantly, you will want to replace (supplement?) Amazon's weird
launcher. "Cover Flow" is not a useful browsing UI when, like me, you
own a couple hundred e-books.
- I'm enjoying the ability to sideload applications on the Fire a bit
too much. It's like a flashback to the days when people used to install
software from websites (or, heaven forbid, a disc from an actual store)
instead of a centralized, curated, for-profit repository. "Oh, Amazon
doesn't let other e-book readers or browsers in their store?
Who cares?"
Overall: it's nice enough, but I'm not throwing my laptop or my Kindle 2
away any time soon.
