I'm sure there are going to be a lot of iPad comparisons, as in this article. There is an obvious reason for them, but I feel the fact the Fire is less than half the price of the cheapest iPad 2 ($200 vs $500) must be kept in mind.
Amazon obviously had to compromise, and my first impressions are they have done a good job. I'm sure if they had aimed for an iPad-like price point, they could have hit iPad-like quality.
Remember that the Kindle Fire is based on the ancient 2.2 version of Android. 2.3 added a much improved JVM which removed one major source of lagginess. 3.0 added GPU acceleration, which removed another. The other major source of lagginess in Android is multitasking which Amazon hopefully addressed by ensuring their default load isn't full of crappy software.
Now that Google has released the Honeycomb and ICS source code, I hope Amazon will keep their Android fork up to date. I heard rumors Amazon would go it alone with their Gingerbread fork, but that would be app compatibility difficult for application developers.
This is why I never buy first generation hardware/software. There are always bugs and whatnot. However, I did make an exception for the Fire. I thought that they would surely have a top notch book reading app. I guess I was wrong.
I mostly will use the Fire for book reading, watching videos, and surfing the web. I was hoping that these things could be done quite well and am disappointed to hear about the issues with the Fire.
I don't own an Android device and the article makes it seem like the issues described with the Fire are indicative on all Android devices. Is this really the case?
I have played around with all the major tablet devices and none of them comes close to have as nice an experience as the iPad. But at $199 (with no tax) I figured the Fire couldn't be so bad as to have buyer's remorse. I don't think I will have buyer's remorse but I was hoping for a more stellar user experience.
I think it's going to be a tradeoff. For the price it might be worth the hiccups. It's hard to be sure, though. I love Android, I'm a complete fanboy, but as a pragmatist I acknowledge its flaws. This article is pretty spot on.
Amazon obviously had to compromise, and my first impressions are they have done a good job. I'm sure if they had aimed for an iPad-like price point, they could have hit iPad-like quality.