Nov 11
4
Kindle Fire is the new revolution in tablets.
Kindle Fire might be the most useful piece of new technology to come out in quite some time. It costs $199 vs. the $499 price tag on the iPad2. While the iPad 2 comes with alot of the features that are duplicated on smart phones, the Kindle Fire boiled down the options to the essentials. Namely web browsing and video, music, and books. I guess they figured that you already have a smart phone with a camera, so why duplicate that.
What you really want is a device that you can watch streaming media on and browse the web with. It need to be small cheap and light, and priced low enough so that it would be an option to just getting a full fledged netbook or notebook. I think they made the right call. The Kindle Fire is light, fast, small enough to hold in one hand, and is priced right. At $199 you can buy 2 and a half of them for the price of one iPad 2. So let’s talk specifics.
Weight – the Kindle Fire is 14 ounces, vs. the iPad 2′s hefty 21 ounces. The iPad 2 seems slim and svelte, but compared to the Kindle Fire, it’s really not.
Speed – both devices have 1 gigahertz dual core processors. When all you are doing is light web browsing and playing video, this is overkill. You will never be waiting on your processor on either of these devices.
Storage – the iPad 2 has 16 Gb of onboard storage, the Kindle Fire has 8Gb. But the Fire comes with free unlimited cloud based storage on Amazon’s hefty server farm. It’s backed up and stored for life. No more issues with lost or broken devices. Your content is safe even though your Kindle Fire gets run over by a truck or your ex hits it with a hammer. So the Fire really shines here.
Screen size – Amazon kind of went out on a limb here, and made a screen size of 7″ which is 2.7″ smaller than the iPad 2. But a common complaint of the iPad 2 is that it is hard to hold. You simply cannot hold it in one hand. It really needs a strap or something to be able to hold. Amazon on the other hand designed the Kindle Fire to be easily held in one hand. And it works. I got my hands on the Kindle Fire at a demo, and it really feels right in my medium sized hand. You can look at it portrait style for books, and landscape mode for video. Both ways it just works in your hand. Very unlike the iPad 2 which feels like you might drop it at any moment.
Browser – The Kindle Fire uses a new and built from the ground up by Amazon Silk browser. I am guessing that it’s named aptly to be smooth as silk. The iPad 2 uses the relatively aged safari browser. Where the rubber meets the road though is in the technology behind the browser. in all small wireless devices, the latency is the real issue. You get on a slow wifi network with 25 other people sucking down a cup of java and streaming a TV show, and it’s gruesome. But the Kindle Fire uses a compression technology called “cloud assist” that in layman’s terms means that it harnesses the power of Amazon’s cloud servers to do some of the work that can be done remotely. So the cloud servers compile the data and compress it back down to your Fire. This is revolutionary stuff folks. Expect to see more and more of this on small handheld devices. No more pokey Joe on a handheld. Now you make a web request and it’s served up like you are sitting at your desk on your dual core desktop and a 16Mb charter pipeline.
I could go on and on and on about the new Kindle Fire. But I’ll leave some mystery for you. Suffice it to say that the little Fire is a workhorse and at $199 is an iPad killer. The Kindle Fire is available at Amazon – Kindle Fire.