Amazon Kindle Fire

The Amazon Kindle Fire puts the Apple iPad on notice. The Fire is the first small tablet that average users can pick up and immediately use, with a simple, clear interface. Then there's the price: Android along with amazing specs for just $199. It's open enough to attract geeks, too. While the user interface occasionally gets sluggish, we're willing to have a bit of patience to get a first-rate tablet for half of what most competitors charge, thus the Kindle Fire is our first Editors' Choice for small tablets.

Design
A solid little brick at 7.5 by 4.7 by .45 inches (HWD) and 14.6 ounces, the Kindle Fire looks and feels a lot like the BlackBerry PlayBook ($499, 2.5 stars), but the Fire is smaller in all dimensions. There are no slots or tabs; both the memory and battery are sealed in, and the only interruptions in its smooth, black form are the headphone jack, Power button, MicroUSB jack, and dual stereo speakers. There's no camera, but I've never been sold on the value of tablet cameras anyway. It uses 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi networks to get online; there's no cellular radio or Bluetooth connectivity.

Turn the Fire on and the 7-inch 1024-by-600 IPS LCD screen lights up. This display is very sharp and clear, but it's also rather reflective. Just like on the Apple iPad 2 ($499-$829, 4.5 stars), you may have trouble reading in bright light because of the screen's sometimes mirror-like gloss. While this is par for the course with tablets, I expected more given the Kindle name. This isn't a dedicated e-reader by any means.

OS and Content
The Kindle Fire packs a dual-core, 1GHz TI OMAP4 processor and runs a very highly customized version of Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). The customization is really good news for non-geeks. Android is a delightfully open-ended OS, but it's too open-ended for a lot of people; it's not immediately clear what you're supposed to do with an Android tablet.?

It's immediately clear what to do with the Kindle Fire, though. Start it up and you see seven words: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, and Web. That's what you do. Most of the rest of the home screen is devoted to a Cover Flow-like carousel of your most recently used content, with four user-assignable favorites at the bottom.

Each of the seven sections gives you a virtual "bookshelf" of items stored on your Fire along with a link to Amazon's relevant store. Yes, this tablet is designed to make you buy stuff from Amazon. You don't have to?you can load your own files?but it's very, very easy to buy and arrange items from Amazon's many digital shops. And that's great.?

Most people are familiar with Kindle books, which read and sync well on the Fire (although they don't have some of the new Kindle Touch features, like X-Ray summaries.) There are some new kinds of content in the bookstore for Amazon too, like color childrens books, for example. But they show up in landscape format. They look like straight flatbed scans, and you can't zoom in or out and there's no text-to-speech support there. That's a less appealing experience than you get on the Nook, at least for now.

The color screen makes comics look very appealing, although Amazon is still working out how to sell them; the Comixology app, and single issues of various comics, weren't available during my test period. In comics, you can double-tap to zoom in on individual panels, but you can't pinch-to-zoom. Two-page spreads end up segmented and zoomed.

Magazines are a mixed bag. You get two kinds: text-only magazines, which basically look like WAP sites or older Kindle documents, and "replica" magazines, which let you flip between images of magazine pages and the text of the articles. Newspapers give you what looks like a downloadable version of the paper's mobile Web site. Amazon has said that it doesn't intend to host replica newspapers.

The Music option lets you stream songs from your Amazon Cloud Drive or play files stored on the device. To get them onto your tablet, you can buy them from the Amazon MP3 store, or drag and drop or sync them from your PC. The Kindle Fire comes with free, unlimited cloud storage for anything you buy from Amazon. You can store non-Amazon files, too, but you only get 5GB; upgrading to 20GB costs $20 per year.

That cloud storage is very important. With only 6.5GB of free, onboard storage, you can only store three or four movies and some choice playlists on the tablet at a time. Everything else resides in the cloud locker, and you swap items in and out when you need more room.

Video lets you rent, buy or download movies or TV shows, or play Amazon Prime's subscription streaming video service. Docs lets you view documents you've sent to the Kindle's dedicated email address. Apps shows the apps you've downloaded from Amazon's app store or sideloaded onto the tablet, and Web loads the Silk browser.

I also played my own media. The Kindle Fire handles MP3, AAC, and OGG music, including album art. For video, it plays H.264 and MPEG4 only, at resolutions up to 1080p. There's no Bluetooth stereo support, HDMI out, or way to connect the Kindle to a TV; Amazon would rather you play its cloud content through an Amazon-enabled set-top box like a TiVo.

I got 4 hours, 55 minutes of continuous video playback on the Kindle Fire. That's longer than our favorite small Honeycomb tablet, the?Acer Iconia Tab A100 ($329, 4 stars), but shorter than other Gingerbread-based tablets we've tested, like the Velocity Micro Cruz T408 ($199.99, 2.5 stars).

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