Amazon's Kindle Fire: So Misunderstood

My Kindle Fire arrived this afternoon, and now, after about two hands-on hours, it's time for some initial impressions.


But first, my dismay -- not with the device, but with the legions of online critics who had already written off the unit even before its launch. Their complaints often fall into a few buckets:


1. It's not an iPad. Very true. The iPad is 10 inches to Fire's seven, and the bigger screen is clearly preferable for watching movies. The iPad has a faster processor, a vastly more extensive app community, a better operating system, and triple the price tag, give or take. I agree with all of these points. However, Amazon wasn't trying to take on the iPad in the first place. The comparison is like condemning a Honda Civic because it's not a Lexus. Well...duh.


2. It lacks both a microphone and a camera (or two). I don't want a camera on my reading device. My smartphone has a camera. My PC has a camera. I don't need another freaking camera. I don't even like videochat in the first place. Not only does this omission leave Amazon room to grow its Kindle feature set later, but it keeps the device more focused on content enjoyment and not on interactive communication. This is a theme you'll see pop up once or twice more.


3. It only has 8GB of internal memory and no SD card slot for memory expansion. Right, so let's back up. Say you're Amazon. You've invested billions of dollars into building out one of the biggest cloud computing infrastructures and services on the planet. You host books in the cloud, store music in the cloud, stream movies from the cloud. You know beyond question that cloud computing is the future, and you want everyone everywhere to get used to relying on your cloud services, which, by the way, work amazingly well. So you build a content consumption device as a pipeline to these cloud services first and still provide some resources for local storage second. Yet many people insist on saying, "Why isn't Amazon building its device like every other tablet -- for local storage?" Because it's about the cloud, stupid. If you're not down with the cloud model, go buy something else.


4. The Kindle Fire is more expensive than several cheap, crappy Android tablet alternatives. This is also true. And for anyone who wants poor screen quality, no content ecosystem, no support, and the build quality of a pizza box, I say to you verily,  "Go for it."

The Kindle Fire lacks GPS, but being something of a privacy paranoid, I'm not sure this is a bad thing. (It still runs Google Maps without issue via the "Silk" Web browser, which will allegedly grow faster as Amazon logs users' browsing habits and strategically caches more pages.) In fact, my only hardware complaint is the omission of Bluetooth. I would like the ability to listen to audiobooks on my headset rather than wired headphones and perhaps add a wireless keyboard and/or mouse for use with Google Docs.


Speaking of which, Amazon's app store doesn't offer Google Docs or Dropbox, two services on which I depend every day. Fortunately, Amazon offers a free download of Quickoffice Pro, which not only ties right into both of those services but also Box, SugarSync, and others. It allows for easy viewing and editing of your Word and Excel files, PDFs, and more. As a writer, this will allow me to keep my Kindle Fire in my bag as a work tool and often leave my notebook at home.


Most of you don't care about this. You want to know about the experience of enjoying content on the device. So here are some initial impressions:


1. With a 1024 x 600 display, text and graphics look awesome. I've now put several books on the Fire, and they all look incredible, although my wife has to dial down the brightness quite a bit to be comfortable. I haven't tried any "enhanced" (interactive, animated) books yet, but I'm confident they will be quite satisfying. Are we taking a forward with color but two steps back by eliminating E Ink? For some, perhaps. I prefer the backlighting because most of my reading is done in a dim room before bed. My wife is more sensitive to light and prefers the more natural look of E Ink. If your principle use for a Kindle is ebook reading, then the monochromatic design may make more sense and save you $100 in the process. Personally, I prefer having more flexibility for a wider range of content.


2. The sound comes from two speakers in the top edge. I recommend digging into the EQ settings and choosing Rock for the best mix of bass and mid-range, but when I say "best," keep this in perspective. These are not Bose speakers. They sound worse than even the $10 beer can speakers included with $299 PCs. But they're better than nothing, and you even get something of a "wide" stereo effect. Unfortunately, this doesn't count for much when you rotate the Fire 90 degrees to watch movies.


3. I tried out the Prime free movie service, which is way simpler to use on the Kindle Fire than on any other Amazon-friendly device I've sampled (such as Google TV). In under 10 seconds, I had the movie Speed streaming at TV-level image quality. No dropped frames, no audio hiccups. Mind you, this was across the house from my router with only one Wi-Fi bar showing. That's pretty impressive.


4. I went to the Kindle Owner's Lending Library and checked out a book. It's really idiotproof. Just hit the button to borrow the title, exactly as you would to buy it. The book downloads in a few seconds and shows up in your library. If you try to borrow another one, you'll see a note saying that you've reached your borrowing limit for the month. You don't have to "give" the book back in 30 days, but you won't be able to check out another until the following month and you return the checked out title. The brilliance of this Lending Library is insidious. If you're enough of a reader to go through one ebook per month, and the average ebook costs, say, $6 or $7 each, then Amazon is giving you roughly $70 to $80 of free ebook enjoyment per year -- if you own a Kindle and subscribe to the $79/year Prime service. Mind you, Prime brings with it thousands of free streaming videos plus free two-day shipping on all Amazon-stocked physical goods orders. Amazon gives you a free month of Prime when you register the Fire, just to get you hooked. Now, I'm a Prime "guest" user on my wife's subscription, so I get the free shipping benefits already, but I don't get the Lending Library or videos. Will it be worth my family paying another $79/year for two full Prime memberships in order to get the extra benefits? This remains open to debate.

5. I went to my public library's site and borrowed a Kindle book. When I send library books to my Android phone via Kindle Manager, they arrive in only a few seconds. With the Kindle Fire, you have to go into the settings menu and hit Sync. It took me a few minutes of waiting for the books list to (not) refresh before I figured this out.


6. Overall, the Fire's interface is friendly and intuitive. I'm not crazy about how the home screen is dominated by a cascade of huge tiles showing your most recently open items. Once you've opened a couple dozen books, apps, songs, etc., it gets fairly cumbersome trying to scroll through these. Similarly, there isn't enough room in the Favorites area to stack your most commonly used items. I quickly found myself relying on the tabs across the top of the screen: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, Web. This entails more tapping and hunting than if the Fire would have had a usual Android desktop, but it is what it is. I hope Amazon improves this soon.


Overall, the Fire is everything I'd hoped for. It's a solid, high-quality, easy, and dependable pipeline to the cloud services I want. Also, I should point out that I own a Nook Color. The Nook is a good device and in some ways better than the Kindle Fire. However, I've held off on buying much content for it because, as a book lover, I still have this crazy idea that I'll "own" my book collection decades from now and be able to let my children and grandchildren enjoy the purchases I'm making today. Whether deluded or not, this begs the question: If I'm going to invest hundreds or even thousands of dollars into content in the coming years, which platform do I trust to be around for the long haul: Nook or Kindle? 


After that question, these ridiculous quibbles over SD slots and memory seem entirely misguided and short-sighted.

Amazon Looks to Burn Out Apple's Roots

Has it been so long that we've forgotten how Apple managed to maintain a foothold in the computing market at a time when the Microsoft/Intel duopoly was virtually universal? It was schools. Before aluminum unibody iBooks and even berry-colored iMacs, Apple has always made sure that it had mindshare in the education market. One could argue that it was this precedent that set the stage for today's shift to adopting iPads in modern classrooms.

Not the average classroom, of course. Not in districts like mine suffering from a $22 million budget shortfall. But in some universities and private/independent schools and, OK, maybe some fortunate public K-12s, teachers are looking to embrace the future and get their kids ahead of the curve. You're even starting to see education courses appear on how to use iPads in the classroom.

Why aren't all schools hopping on the iPad wagon? No doubt, there are many reasons, ranging from IT management concerns to outright pigheaded technophobia. But one of the top inhibitions has to be the $750 average price per device I wrote about earlier this year. When districts have to start implementing "budget closure days" in order to balance their bottom lines, who has $750 for every student to get a new tablet? There are roughly 55 million American elementary and secondary school students. Figure in a small group discount, and that's about $40 billion in iPads.

But along comes the 7-inch, Android-based Kindle Fire at $199. Suddenly, our budget to outfit every first through 12th grader drops to $11 billion. For reference, this is about the going rate for one month of U.S. war in Afghanistan and only slightly more than the bonus pay received by JP Morgan investment bankers in 2010.

So does it seem feasible that we as a country that still allegedly values its future could find a way to give our students each a tablet? I'd like to think so. If that sounds too entitled or socialist, fine. For $199 a pop, I'd find a way to come up with the money for each of my two boys. All I need to see is that the apps and content are there to make it worthwhile. (And sure, having teachers and administrators with a clue how to make use of current technology would be a great bonus.)

This brings us to the root of my point: I have yet to see anyone in the press discuss the Amazon Kindle Fire as an educational device in the same way that the iPad is now being touted, but in this regard I really think Amazon may have an iPad killer in the works. Do students need a camera or 3G wireless connectivity in a tablet? No. Those who want such things already have them in their phones. Do kids really need the bigger screen for virtual keyboard typing? No. You can create notes on a screen well enough, but serious content creation still demands a mouse, keyboard, and more pixels than you're going to cram into even 10 inches. And as someone who owns both a 10" Android tablet and a 7" NOOK Color, I can vouch for the fact that a 7" form factor is far more convenient. All it took was one business trip with both devices, and the 10" has stayed home ever since.

Yes, the Kindle Fire is being sold at a few bucks under Amazon's manufacturing cost in order to hit that tantalizing $199 price point, because Amazon knows it will make up the money on content purchases made through the device. But check out Amazon's Android app store, which I find far preferable to the chaos of the conventional Android Marketplace. I'll wager that the 1,125 educational titles now listed in Amazon's store will grow by several times over the next year. Amazon already has a full-blown textbook division, complete with a Kindle-based rental sub-site. And does it matter that the Kindle Fire doesn't have expandable storage when all of your purchases can be stored on and streamed from Amazon's Cloud Drive for free?

The only drawback I see here is that slowly yet surely, those who ride the Amazon education train will become locked into Amazon's platform. The other day, I picked up my old high school American History textbook to check a fact. In 25 years, if my kids want to do this, they might have to be paying to make sure they can still access their Amazon digital content. This rankles, but I also think it's inevitable as the world gradually, increasingly makes premium content, including books, into a subscription service. Whether you pay Amazon or Apple or Microsoft or whatever other mega-providers emerge in the future, you're going to pay someone as sure as you pay the utility companies today. But I digress.

I want my kids, and all kids, to have a tablet as part of their everyday learning and curriculum. Google was unable to take the wind from Apple's sails in this regard because it didn't have any control over the hardware ecosystem. Amazon has now remedied that problem, and in the Kindle Fire the company has an entry device into a complete content infrastructure that's tailor-made for student and educator needs. All that's left is to see the software developers leap in with the same creativity that they've shown on the iPad. Here's to hoping that Amazon will encourage them in this pursuit and recognize the educational gold mine now within its reach.