Specifications

Amazon Kindle Fire
The Amazon Kindle Fire is what the tech world likes to coin a game-changer. A gadget with the
potential to irrevocably alter a sector of the market to the point of no return.
A fully-fledged Android tablet with a top-level ecosystem of multimedia content for less than
half the price of its competitors isn't just changing the game, it's changing the entire sport.
The long-awaited, 7-inch, Android 2.3 Gingerbread tablet, which Amazon has been diligently
plotting for the last couple of years off the back of its Kindle e-reader successes, also arrives at
the perfect time with the tablet arena at a crossroads.
Usability
This is the first Kindle to boast a color screen, a holy grail to some users of the device, and with
a 7-inch, 1024x600 display it falls at the smaller end of the tablet sphere.
With Android 2.3 (not the newer tablet-centric Honeycomb 3.0 software) on board, it's also the
the first to run anything other than the non-native software. However, Amazon's custom designed
user interface takes precedence.
On a $199 tablet, it's asking a lot for everything to run as smoothly in the engine room as it does
on the top line devices like the iPad 2.
The device and user-interface is slick and the pace is acceptable without ever being iOS-quick.
However, a start-up time of 36 seconds is slower than the iPad 2 (22 seconds) and the other top-
of-the-line Android tablets.
What customers say
On occasions we did experience a little bit of a lag when opening apps, and selecting new items
from within apps, but it wasn't something that was overly annoying or apparent. Other reviewers
have made a much bigger deal of this than we feel is justified. It simply isn't that bad.
We certainly didn't experience any lag when turning book pages as some reviews have claimed.
However, apps often quit on us during our tests, which will need to be sorted by software
updates.
Overall verdict
The presence of Amazon's own Android appstore means there's no Google-supported Android
Market on this device. What that means is a dramatic reduction in the officially available