Kindle Fire HD 8.9
NoahDesign 7
The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 has a unique black matt finish, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. It feels and looks excellent…until the fingerprints cover it. And you’d better hope your hands don’t get sweaty, because the back will become slippery and disgusting. The display is covered in glass, like every other tablet on the market. The power button and volume rocker on the right side feel very cheap, as they’re made of plastic. Also, the two buttons feel identical except for the length, which resulted in feeling along the side for the correct button rather than being confident that I was hitting the desired one. Speaker placement was very, very poor. I really can’t think of a place where they could be more easily muffled. If you’re holding it in portrait mode than your hands should avoid them for the most part. But when holding the tablet in landscape mode (the way it’s meant to be held) your hands are guaranteed to cover the speakers, which results in distorted, bass-absent sound. Display 7 You’ll find the 1920x1080 display decent for viewing movies and pictures, although not as great as I expected from such a high resolution screen. Saturation on the 8.9” screen is well balanced. The high resolution, while making text and pictures look sharp, poses a problem when it comes to performance. The display is plenty bright, but the minimum brightness should be dimmer, as I found it hard on my eyes in a dark room. Pixels are virtually indistinguishable; as well they should be at 254 ppi, only 10 ppi less than the Retina iPad. Unfortunately the display feels rather far from my finger, as though the glass separating them is too thick. The result is taps that leave me momentarily unsure as to whether or not they registered, and a less captivating experience than touch displays usually bring. Battery Life 8 The battery should get you through the whole day, although if you’re a hardcore user or plan on playing a few hours of graphically intensive games (which I wouldn’t recommend), you could very well find yourself looking for an outlet before the day is done. At times you’ll only have to charge it every other day, depending on how much you use it and what kind of things you do. User Interface 6 The home page of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is essentially a multitasker. The string of apps ordered first to last by the one you last used. These can be removed by pressing and holding, then tapping “Remove from Carousel”. I do not like this at all, as it allows for no organization. Sure, there is the “Apps” menu, but this simply lists all your apps in alphabetical order, and does not allow you to arrange them at all. Along the top is a string of shortcuts to different genres of apps (books, games, videos and music among other things) as well as some productivity related apps. I found this very useful in getting directly to the type of app I was looking for. There is a Favorites star in the bottom right-hand corner, where you can put your most used apps, and even playlists. Web Browsing 5 The stock web browser, Silk, is rather disappointing. The buttons in the app felt especially far from my finger, more so than when using other apps. A contributor to this is that when touching buttons such as the x to close out tabs, there is no light or feedback to let you know that you touched the button, which makes me momentarily wonder if my touch registered. You can share pages easily enough to social networks and email, just remember there is no Google+ app, thus no option of sharing to that social network on the same menu used for sharing to the others. The overall web browsing experience is further marred by a weird scrolling system. Every time I scroll up or down on a webpage it acts as though it has to reload. The screen is momentarily covered in a checker-like pattern before the text loads. I found this very annoying, and it does not help that scrolling is often jerky. Pinch-to-zoom is fairly smooth. Social 6 Social apps are not at all integrated into the Kindle Fire. Although most of the popular social apps are downloadable, they feel like they’re designed for smartphones and increased in size to fit an 8.9 inch screen. Some apps such as Google+ are entirely missing from the app store. Of course there is your standard mail app, which does a fairly good job of making tasks easy and efficient. It is easy to delete, move or mark one or multiple emails. If you mark and email, there are only two options: “star” and “mark as unread”. Moving, on the other hand, lets you pick from an array of folders. The front facing camera is excellent for video chat. Pixels are definitely visible yet the picture is fairly clear. Color reproduction, while fairly accurate, doesn’t exactly look good. While using the Skype app there was a really weird glitch; the other person would turn a variety of colors with pixilation heavy on the screen. I believe this is the app’s problem, as it did not happen when using the camera at any other time. Gaming 4 This is where the 1080p display and lackluster hardware becomes a real problem: Gaming. If you’re simply going to play Angry Birds, than I’m sure you’ll be content, and the game will look pretty good. But when playing the graphically intensive The Dark Knight Rises, the Fire’s high resolution screen and lack of power really showed. It was virtually impossible to play, with constant stuttering. The game looked pretty good when the camera was holding still, but any animations or movement of the camera resulted in lag that rendered the game unplayable. Real Racing 3 had similar issues. Some of the time things ran quite smooth, but at one point the text failed to load at all, leaving me with a wordless menu and nameless upgrades that cost unknown amounts. I had to restart the app. The menu on Real Racing 3 is extremely lag-ridden, and doing something as simple as repairing your car after a race is a shore due to the amount of stuttering. Temple Run 2, a much less graphically intense game, ran smoothly, with rare hiccups when loading screens. It looked very good. Bottom line, if you’ll be playing any kind of graphically intensive game, look to a tablet that can support its screen resolution. Media 6 If you own a lot of music, videos and books on Amazon, than accessing media on your Kindle is a breeze. You simply download it from the Cloud. But if your music is on iTunes or Windows Media Player, you’ll have to go through a few more steps. Unfortunately you cannot drag and drop files from your computer onto the Kindle as on true Android devices. The display is great in general, but I was expecting more for such a high resolution. Colors popped, saturation is good. However, screen lacks the impression that the image you’re viewing is on top of the glass, coming out at you, an aspect that graces my favorite tablet screens. The Kindle does come with a camera app, which can be accessed by going to “photos”. The tablet lacks a rear-facing camera, so pictures can only be taken with the front-facing camera. Unsurprisingly, pictures were grainy and colors were dull. Details could not be picked out. To make matters worse there is absolutely no software options on the camera. You can’t even zoom in (who would want to with a front-facing camera?). There is no real flash, but the screen brightens and turns white just before the picture is snapped, acting as a flash. Annoyingly there is no option for turning this “feature” off. It is worth noting the lack of a Youtube app for this device. A Netflix app is available, as well as Pandora. |
DanielDesign 7
From first sight, I was quite delighted with the design, but there are a few annoying quirks worth mentioning. Overall I thought it was rather classy, the body is nice and thin, and the soft touch plastic back makes it feel fairly premium and durable. There’s sort of a quirky plastic strip around the edge of the device, which just looks kinda unprofessional. The volume rocker and the lock button are very close together, and feel the same, making it very confusing and annoying when trying to change the volume during a movie or that sort of thing. If you can get used to it, it’s not a big deal, but chances are it will just be annoying forever. I was hoping the Kindle Fire would be small enough that it wouldn’t look stupid in portrait mode, but it isn’t. Hold it in landscape as much as possible. When it’s held right, the speaker grills are on either edge, about an inch from the bottom. Actually, they’re right about where your hands would be, making it easy to cover them up. The Fire looks very nice, but there are a lot of things Amazon could have thought through better. Display 7 At a normal viewing distance, I found pixels hard to discern on the Full HD screen. Brightness is about normal for a tablet. The colors aren’t very accurate, everything seems to have a yellowish tint, which isn’t really noticeable unless you compare with better displays, but if you want an accurate representation of color on the screen, it’s probably better to stay away from the Fire. Overall, the screen is great, but one look at an iPad or a Nexus 10 and you won’t be impressed with the Fire. Battery Life 8 The nice thing about the Kindle Fire is you won’t use it for much more than watching movies and reading books, so the battery will likely last a long time. Amazon rates it at 10 hours, but you definitely won’t get much more than two full length films if you’re streaming HD videos. Still, that’s pretty good. Plug it in every night, and you’ll be fine. User Interface 5 Personally, I found Amazon’s Fire interface to be rather annoying; technically, the Fire runs a modified version of Android 4.0 (yes, still Ice Cream Sandwich), but any Android fan will beat you to death with a Nexus 7 if you dare to call the Fire, “android”. The home screen is basically a carousel of everything you’ve opened, sorted by the most recent. By everything, I mean all the content, apps, books, music, web pages, movies, etc. unless you specifically remove it from the carousel. There’s also a “favorites” tray of pretty much unlimited items, which is the only customization available, everything else will stay the way it is. Across the top is a categories banner for seeing all that you have of any category such as apps, music, games, etc. The UI definitely works well, but if you’d like more customization go for a real Android tablet, or even iOS. The lock screen of the Fire “with special offers” is downright lame. Absolutely the only things displayed are an ad and the unlock button. No time, date, or any other information whatsoever. The lock screen on the without special offers version has the date and time, and of course no ads. The price difference between the two is about $15. Web Browsing 7 Amazon’s working on a browser they call Silk, and for some reason, they put it on the Kindle Fire. It’s fairly smooth and accurate; there’s some noticeable lag, but not too bad. Starting a new tab shows some helpful quick links, and you can set bookmarks, all pretty standard for a mobile web browser. It has a reader mode too, and I always appreciate the option to get rid of all the noise around an article. This, however, is not a very good reader; it doesn’t do a great job of recognizing what’s part of the article and what’s not. You’ll have times where it just pulls a random section of the article, and other times various ads will be thrown in the mix. Silk makes noticeably slow work of rendering web pages, and even small web pages often render much slower than you scroll, and they often have to render again when you scroll back. This is obviously better or worse depending on internet speed, but using safari on iOS with the same wifi connection had no such problems. Silk’s got a long way to go, but for being such a new browser, it’s fairly decent. Social 5 There are a few standard social apps on Amazon’s app market, but don’t expect every app you want to be there. Stuff like Facebook and Twitter will be there, but for a lot of them you’ll be using a cheaply made third party app by someone who wanted, for example, Instagram on the Kindle Fire. Once you have apps downloaded, you can share stuff directly from certain apps, including Amazon Silk. The included email app is pretty simple, but there’s a lot of quirky things about it that are fairly annoying. For the most part though, it works pretty well, and you’ll be able to do some basic email communication with it. The layout of the keyboard is a wee bit unique, basically all of the keys have secondary functions. That’s okay, and can be handy in some cases, but it’s also not very practical in my opinion. I’d definitely say I’ve seen better keyboard layouts. It has a split keyboard view for when you’d rather type with your thumbs, and a swype feature, but no voice to text. The Swype feature is fairly accurate, but not the best I’ve seen. Gaming 4 Simply put, if you’re interested in a tablet for gaming, stay away from Amazon. Even for a tablet, the game selection is terrible, so the chances of getting the game you want are not very high. It’s got some of the popular arcade games such as Temple Run, Cut the Rope, and Angry Birds, but again, don’t have high expectations. 3D games are rare and typically not worth playing; The Dark Knight Rises, for example, is so stuttery and difficult to control that it’s just no fun. If you do decide to purchase Kindle Fire, my recommendation is that you don’t spend any money on games, unless you can get a free trial to test it out first. You really don’t know if the game will work well, and you can’t use apps purchased on Amazon’s app market on any non-kindle device, so you’d be stuck paying for a game that you don’t play. Real Racing 3 is probably the best game that plays smoothly on the Fire, most racing games will probably do fine. Overall, games didn’t look amazing, but performance is better than looks when it comes to these games. Though it doesn’t perform well either. It's basically terrible. Media 8 Media is really where the Kindle Fire shines, but even here, it could do better. Watching movies is great on the Full HD screen, and X-Ray is a convenient feature for those who like knowing who’s acting. If you have an Amazon Prime account, you can instantly stream select videos in HD for free, and the rest can be rented for a few bucks each. Some books have the X-Ray feature, which is particularly nice when you’re having a hard time remembering which character is which (in which case you should try a different book, I recommend Winnie the Pooh). The text to speech feature works great, but I’ve found it hard to get into books being read in a monotone voice, especially the exciting and dramatic parts. The one feature that’s noticeably missing is the page turn animation, which is a bummer, but I’ll get over it. The speakers are loud enough, but not really “booming”, as advertised by Amazon. Also, they just don’t seem to produce a very accurate sound, it’s missing a lot of bass. It’s hard to find better tablet speakers, which just makes me sad. The Kindle Fire has a 1 MP front facing camera, which you can use to take pictures with, but really it’s intended for video chatting, which was pretty good on a solid internet connection. Photos aren’t very good, and the camera is in kind of an inconvenient spot, so don’t buy this with the expectation of taking many pictures. Viewing photos is really great though, a high quality picture will seem to pop out on the screen. Honestly, if you want a great media device and you don’t care about anything else, the Kindle Fire is probably for you. |
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