First Impressions Of The Kindle Fire

I received my Kindle Fire today and after playing around with it I have to say that it looks like Amazon has a winner on its hands. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m an Amazon Prime member and have most of my books, music and documents stored in Amazon’s cloud so I’m not unbiased about the company. That being said, I have also owned Macs and iPads, not to mention RIM’s Playbook tablet, so I am in no way a mere Amazon fan boy. I have read some mixed reviews about the Fire but the best way to form an opinion about something is to try it out for yourself instead of deferring to legions of invisible people who may or may not know what they are talking about. Are there kinks to be worked out? Yes, as there would be with any new tech product. This is not an iPad killer, it wasn’t meant to be, but what it does it does exceedingly well. And at $199 which is less than half the cheapest iPad, you get a lot of bang for your bucks. The device has a silky smooth browser; Amazon in fact calls its customized android effort Silk. It also has above average sound, a wonderful screen and is super easy to set up and use. Matched with Amazon’s massive content selection and for the first time there is serious competition in the tablet space. Amazon doesn’t release sales figures for its Kindle family but several reputable analysts have said that they believe the company has sold north of 5 million Fires alone since its launch nearly 3 months ago. That’s a faster pace than the original iPad managed to shoot out of the gates in 2010. With Apple set to release the iPad 3 sometime this spring, it’s promising to be a bruising tablet battle in 2012 and it’s going to be fun as a consumer and tech fan to see how it all plays out.