My Kindle Fire arrived last Wednesday, a day earlier than expected; Amazon making the most of their “shipping a day early” announcement. Naturally I had to open the box as soon as it arrived and I was impressed.
The Fire is a very discreet black pad, small enough to fit in my pocket, even with the leather cover I’d ordered. Speaking of the cover, it’s a black Marware leather Kindle cover. To be completely honest, I had more trouble with the cover than with the Kindle. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it, and now, a week later, I really like it, but I’ll admit to a bit of confusion at first.
The Fire booted up quickly, though it isn’t an ‘instant on’ device and found my home network without much trouble. Like my previous Kindles this one was already registered to my account so I had media available and ready to go once I’d walked through the relatively few steps of getting set up.
The Fire uses a fork of Android and so the experience is somewhat different if you are used to Android on another device (mine being an HTC EVO phone). It’s not difficult to use, though I find the “Carousel,” the portion of the screen devoted to recent documents, applications, whatever, a bit touchy. I have a hard time slowing it down once I’ve swiped it into motion.
The screen in gorgeous. I don’t know if it’s up to iPhone standards as I don’t own one, but it’s definitely a winner.
The Fire also comes with a free month of Amazon Prime to use with streaming video (Prime Instant Video). Here in Hawaii I’d had no reason to sign up, even at only $79 a year, because Amazon doesn’t support the free two day shipping (Prime’s original raison d’etre), but I’m certainly thinking of keeping it now. I haven’t tried Netflix on the Fire yet though.
I set up my email accounts on the merely adequate email application so that I could at least communicate this weekend. I was attending a convention Thursday-Sunday and wouldn’t have time to really play with the Fire, but I’d decided to give it a workout as my go-to device of choice. Therefore I loaded it up with the Excel spreadsheet of contact numbers and titles for the convention volunteers, the PDF schedule of events, and a variety of other things I’d need each day (I was on the steering committee so I needed access to working docs).
Thankfully, as I mentioned, the Fire fit in my pocket of my slacks so I wasn’t required to carry it by hand all day – and have it with me all day I did. The battery lasted me from 8am to 10pm each day, though I would plug it in for brief periods when I went to my room to rest or shower. Naturally I wasn’t using the Fire for the entire day, but I consulted it frequently, both for email and for documents.
In short I gave it a real-life workout and came away impressed. But…
Isn’t there always a ‘but?’
I missed a few things. Because the stock Fire is restricted to the Amazon App store a few things are currently missing that I rely on.
- Dropbox – Luckily you can simply download the app from Dropbox’s Android website. I had no trouble installing it.
- Gmail App – I love the Gmail app as most of my email accounts are on Gmail. Yes I do have a few others, but don’t use them much. In order to get this, I ended up having to root my Fire and add the regular Android Market. This turned out to be easier than I though – more below.
- Swype – How did we ever get along without Swype? This was a little more difficult to install, requiring root access and the ability to edit the Settings.db to add the input method. Still it isn’t something to be afraid of it you are patient.
I’m not going to post the instructions on how to root your Fire here – mostly because other folks have already done a great job and I’d hate to make a mistake somewhere along the line that bricks your Fire.
I used the instructions I found on RootKindleFire in their Mac section.
Putting the Google framework and Android Market on required the instructions from xdadevelopers. The hardest bit on a Mac was realizing I had to download something to open RAR files. Not a big deal.
I’m also using the Voodoo OTA Rootkeeper app to switch back and forth between root and regular. This seems to be much simpler than always having to use something on my Mac while tethered.
Swype was the most difficult bit as I got started on the wrong foot with what I guess was a bad bit of info. Good info can be found here on xdadevelopers.
I spent a good evening playing around with root, the G apps, and Swype but never felt I was in over my head. Just be patient. Now I’ve got Gmail running, use Swype, and can switch back and forth to and from root access (Prime doesn’t work while rooted). Life is good.
The skinny is that the Kindle Fire is a great little pad for the price and, with a wee bit of tweaking, it’s darn near perfect (till something better comes along of course).
Aloha