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Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Feel the Heat: A Complete Kindle Fire Review

The Kindle Fire is an enhanced version of Amazon's original Kindle, which was released in 2007 and quickly became a popular bestseller worldwide. This Kindle Fire review will give you the run down on Amazon's latest product aimed at the tablet reader market. Some of the new enhancements added to the Kindle Fire include a color touch screen, increased processor speed, and an improved web browsing capability.

Color Touchscreen
The Kindle Fire includes a 7" color touch screen, which incorporates In-Plane Switching technology panel (IPS). This technology includes small crystals which lie parallel to the IPS panel. Hitachi originally developed IPS technology in 1996 in order to broaden viewing angles. This means you do not have to be directly in front of the screen in order to see what is on the screen. This can come in handy when simultaneously viewing movies with other people. IPS technology also dramatically increases color quality by delivering 16 million colors in high resolution. Amazon has seamlessly incorporated IPS technology into the Kindle Fire, which is a huge improvement from the original Kindle product's ink display screen. Additionally, the multi-touch screens responds well.

Dual-Core Processor
Amazon has also added a dual-core processor to the Kindle Fire for faster response when surfing the web and viewing e-books, magazines, and movies. This is a significant improvement from Amazon's original Kindle's processing power. Users will definitely notice improved speed and efficiency when streaming online media, such as music and videos. This is perfect for those who like to watch videos on websites such as YouTube or listen to music on Pandora. For those who enjoy multitasking online, the dual-core processor will help those who like to stream music while reading books. Download speeds have also greatly increased.

Intuitive Interface
Users will appreciate Kindle Fire's smart and easy-to-use interface design. You can easily browse through recently accessed reading material, movies, videos, and music directly from the home screen. You can easily access all types of media and content with a single touch. This can be quite useful for those who regularly perform Internet research.

Large Selection of Content from Amazon
One powerful advantage Amazon has over its competitors in the e-tablet market is the company's massive selection of content. The gadget can easily access Amazon's massive catalog of over 18 million titles of all types of electronic media with just a touch. This includes over 100,000 movies and television shows which users can stream, download, purchase or rent. Amazon Prime members may also stream over 10,000 select movies and television shows. This beats going to the movie theater or watching live television because Amazon has taken out all of the annoying movie previews and television commercials.

An Array of Games and Apps
No Kindle Fire review would be complete without mentioning the multitude of apps and games available. Amazon has tested thousands of the most popular apps and games to ensure proper compatibility. Fire users will also receive one paid app for free everyday. Most of the apps and games only cost between $0.99 to $1.49 on Amazon.

This is one of my favorite aspects of the gadget. I travel by plane regularly, which means that I have a lot of downtime waiting in airport terminals. Sometimes the airport terminal can be too noisy and distracting for reading a book, however a game, which requires me to be actively involved really helps to pass time quickly. One of my all-time favorites is the classic game of Solitaire, which is available on the Kindle Fire.

Amazon Silk Browser
The Kindle Fire features a new browser known as Amazon Silk. This new browser is cloud-accelerated, which means that it draws upon Amazon's Web Services cloud (AWS), also known as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This server contains extensive computational power, which is available to all Kindle Fire users. The EC2 server performs with a round-trip latency of 5 milliseconds or less, which is twenty times faster than most wireless connections.

The Amazon Silk browser delegates a portion of computational labor to the EC2 server, which connects more quickly to the Internet than the device's wifi connection. This conserves computational and battery power. The division of labor between the mobile hardware and the server is known as "split browser" architecture.

I personally have noticed that the Kindle Fire responds faster than the original Kindle when streaming video on websites such as YouTube. Download times are also faster than my original Kindle. Many other Kindle Fire reviews have expressed the same experience. If you bought the original Kindle and are looking for a mobile device that performs faster on the web, then upgrading to the Kindle Fire is a sure bet.

Magazine Layouts
One aspect of the original Kindle which I did not particularly care for is the inability to view magazines in the same layout available in the print version. Part of the appeal of print magazines is the craftsmanship of the magazine layouts. The device addresses this issue with its "Page View" option, which offers hundreds of magazines in full-color layouts just like the print versions. In fact, the Kindle Fire offers even more than what the print version contains by including video, audio, and other interactive media.

However, I have noticed other Kindle Fire reviews claim that the tablet's screen can be too small to read an entire magazine page in the "Page View" mode. Although, this is not my experience, if you prefer to view just the text of the magazine, then you can choose the "Text View" option. Additionally, although I have not tried it out myself, another Kindle Fire review I read claims that the device works well with comic book layouts as well.

Social Media
One aspect which I found to be lacking in the Amazon's latest gadget is the lack of built-in native social media apps. Although, overall I am happy about the device, I felt that a full Kindle Fire review should address this short-coming. Social media is such an important aspect of how we communicate today that it seems almost outdated not having some built-in native Facebook or Twitter apps. The supposed Facebook and Twitter "apps" are actually just links to the mobile sites. However, for some this may be preferable because the mobile sites do not take up storage space on the mobile device.

If you are looking to purchase a tablet reader, which offers more than just displaying simple text, then this gadget is a good choice. The Kindle Fire is also cheaper than its main competitor, the Apple iPad. Amazon's mobile device runs around $200, while the iPad can cost anywhere from $400 to $500.

This Kindle Fire review is based upon my experience using the device for approximately a month now. So far, I have had few complaints and the device has worked flawlessly. However, the device has only been on the market for a short time, therefore nobody has posted a Kindle Fire review based upon any prolonged use of the device.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6839303

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