Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire is not the champion for Android tablets, but it is the right product for Amazon.

I watched review and comparison videos on YouTube as I have not bought a Kindle Fire yet.  From those videos I had the impression that Kindle Fire is not as fast as Apple's iPad 2.  The page loading and refresh speed is slower than that on iPad 2. The touch response does not seems to be as smooth.  By most measures for a web browsing device and a game console, I doubt it can compete with iPad 2.  Nevertheless, I still think it is a good and smart product.

I have complained about last generation's Kindle reader earlier this year. This new generation of Kindle answered my complaints. The touch screen takes away the clumsiness for users to interact with contents. Compared with the previous generation, Kindle Fire provides all the needed improvements in terms of color display, faster page flipping and rendering. It also provides a comparable video experience as iPad 2. Given its price, it is an adequate tablet but an outstanding content viewer. It is exactly right up Amazon's alley for all the digital contents it wants to sell.

Kindle Fire is a smart product with a right compromise and feature focus. I may buy one for my daughter to read on. But I am sure she will ask for my iPad when it comes to Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Young users do not settle for their game experiences.

Amazon Kindle experience

I bought a 6" Amazon Kindle device recently to save bookshelf space. But the user experience really fell short.

I have used the very first generation Kindle. At that time, I was evaluating the Kindle device for a work related project. I understood it was the first generation, and Amazon was not an OEM vendor. Even that its industrial design and build quality left much to be desired, I was willing to give the first generation Kindle full credit. It did what it was set out to do: to put an e-reader in front of the publishers and to persuade them to go digital. In the long run, Amazon can make a fat margin on digital contents by saving a lot on inventory, facility and distribution.

More than two years later after my first encounter with Kindle, Kindle made quite some changes to its appearance. With more and more books piling up on my bookshelves, I thought it is time for me to mingle with Kindle. I bought a couple of Kindle books and started reading. The experience was not satisfactory. It is maybe that the e-ink display took too long to refresh. It took too long to flip a page. It is fine to read a book sequentially for the first time. But after a while, I need to use those books as reference books and go back and forth among pages regularly. It is really annoying and counter productive to wait for page refresh in order to flip 3 to 5 pages.

My experience with Kindle may not be applicable to all Kindle users. Different types of books warrant different usage patterns. But I think it is time for Kindle to revamp. It was a good work to pave the digital way all the way here. Nevertheless, the gap in user experience is increasing. One misstep, the path will turn to iPad and put Amazon to a peripheral position in providing digital contents. Without a leading position, it will undercut the margin Amazon could have hoped for in promoting all those digital books and magazines.