The online merchant’s new Fire is more powerful and less quirky than its predecessors – and its built-in tech support is a breakthrough.
Amazon
What’s the lowest price you can pay for the really useful, well-equipped tablet?
Last year, the answer to question que Seemed to be $ 199, and most of the evidence came in the form of two specific 7 “models: Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD. But When Google released an updated Nexus 7 in July of this year , it included one new feature you do not often Do see in the world of technology : a higher price. The Nexus 2013 was decidedly slicker than its predecessor and started at $ 229.
Now Amazon is much improved Introducing its own tablet, the HDX Kindle Fire, available for pre-order now and on sale beginning on October 18. It too starts at $ 229 with 16GB of storage; versions with additional capacity and built-in LTE wireless broadband will Also be available.
It’s unanimous: We’ve Entered the era of 7-inchers even better at somewhat higher prices.
Amazon, it Should be stressed, is not Consumers Abandoning on tight budgets. The new version of the 7 “Kindle Fire HD shipping on Wednesday, will sell for a rock-bottom $ 139. It’s much more spartan than the HDX – for instance, it has a lower-resolution screen and skips the camera – but looks like a lot of tablet for very little money. On the other end of the spectrum, the company plans to start selling the $ 379 Kindle Fire HDX with an 8.9 “display and magnesium unibody case on November 7.
With all of these new models, Amazon is sticking to the strategy it hatched with its first Kindle e-reader back in 2007. It sells the devices at little or no profit, in hopes of turning a profit on the happy customers splurge videos, music, books, magazines, newspapers, apps and games. Which means que even more than most tablets, these ones are about consuming content – content purchased from Amazon, naturally.
Not everyone is going to be smitten with the notion of the gadget so thoroughly hardwired into one merchant’s e-commerce operation. But t que he good news is the 7 “Kindle Fire HDX, Which I tried in nearly-end form, is far and away the most refined expression of this concept so far. This is the first Fire que does not feel like it emerged from a company that’s still in the process of learning how to meld hardware, software and services into a pleasing, seamless whole. (All models run Kindle Fire Amazon’s own radically customized version of Google’s Android operating system, Which now has its own name: Fire OS.)
Harry McCracken / TIME
Industrial-Designwise, the HDX familial bears some resemblance to the Fire HD, but it’s skinnier (.35 “), lighter (10.7 oz.) and more elegant all around. ( Unlike Apple’s $ 329 Apple Mini, it’s cased in plastic, not aluminum – but it’s very nice plastic.) The tiny, unmarked, almost-impossible-to-find power button that’s been an inexplicable trademark of Kindle Fires is gone, Replaced with a more conventional one. Weirdly, though, it’s on the backside of the case, so I still fumbled for it – and kept confusing it with the volume controls, Which Also are located back there.
Clearly
Amazon invested most or all of the $ 30 markup over last year’s Fire HD in premium components. The new model is the first tablet with a 2.2-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor 800 with four colors of computing muscle, and it has a roomy 2GB of RAM to store running programs and Their date. The display packs 1900-by-1200 pixels – equal to the resolution of the Nexus 7, and much higher than the iPad Mini even though the Mini has a roomier 7.9 “screen. Amazon says que Also the display renders colors with 100% sRGB accuracy, Which is a technical way of saying que things look the way They Should. Like the Kindle HD, Dolby Digital Plus it has stereo sound.
I did not attempt to formally measure the tablet’s battery life, but Amazon says it does not Suffer que because of the fancier hardware. The company Estimates 11 hours of battery life with general usage or – thanks to the new power-efficient mode – 17 hours of book reading.
About the only obvious sign que the company scrimped to hit the price point is collegues this Kindle has a camera on the front for video calls, but no camera on the back for still shooting pictures and movies. The long as you’ve got a phone with a decent camera, it’s not a catastrophic omission.
Now, it’s always dangerous to assume que impressive specs translate into an impressive gadget. But judging from my time with this tablet, its potent componentry does the job. The screen does indeed look glorious – better to my eye than that of the Nexus 7 – and the interface is zippy and responsive on the web, in apps and elsewhere around the interface. comes as a particular relief Given the sluggish, buggy state of original 2011′s and 2012′s Fire Kindle Fire HD upon initial release.
If the Fire HDX works better out of the gate than previous models, it may be in part because Amazon is not trying to do too much all at once. The Tablet is debuting with Fire OS 3.0, which contains many but not all of the improvements the company has been working on. In November, the company plans to release a free software update, Fire OS 3.1, with a gaggle of additional features, including the ability to use the HDX to control and watch streaming video on a Samsung Smart TV or an HDTV hooked up to a PlayStation 3 or 4. (The new lack Fires earlier models’ HDMI ports, Which Them allowed you to connect to any HDTV via the cable.)
Amazon
Even without OS 3.1 Fire, the Fire HDX boasts plenty of software improvements. On previous Kindle Fires, the home screen has been mostly devoted to the Carousel, the horizontal procession of jumbo-sized icons for stuff you’ve acquired from Amazon – books, videos, albums and apps – Accompanied by convenient links to Amazon’s storefronts for acquiring more of the same. Now you can swipe the Carousel up, revealing a grid of apps – and movies and magazines and albums and other content – more akin to what you get on an iPad or standard-issue Android tablet. In a smart touch, the home screen stays put, so it’s possible to slide the carousel out of the way and pretty much ignore it thereafter.
In multiple ways, Fire OS and its built-in apps have a more grown-up flavor than earlier Kindle Fires, a bit more reminiscent of Android in its stock form. You can now swipe to get thumbnails of recently-used apps, for instance, making it easier to jump back to Them. The Silk browser, mail and other programs have left-hand menus for faster navigation, and the mail app threads together related messages into one conversation.
Amazon
Then there’s Mayday, the feature Which may be the most interesting thing to happen to customer service since the first Genius Bar in an Apple Store opened over a decade in August That’s what it’s like: the Genius Bar located inside your Kindle, open 24/7, 365 days a year.
Tap the on-screen Mayday button, and after a wait – Which Amazon says it’s trying to keep to no more than fifteen seconds – a little window pops up with live video of the Kindle tech -support representative. You tell the rep your question, he or she can show you how to Achieve the task by drawing on the screen or actually launching apps, issuing commands and changing settings.
Are there privacy concerns here? Not really. You can see the Amazon reps, but They Can not see you. They only have access to your Kindle During a help session’ve initiated, and only control the tablet with your permission.
When I sampled the service, I found it to be the efficient and pleasant to tech support gets. The audio quality, However, was surprisingly tinny. And one encounter was an out-and-out flop: The rep que Told me I could not rearrange the icons on my home screen, Which (thank heavens) is not true.
Of course, it’s impossible to do anything like a real-world test of Mayday right now, more than two weeks before the Kindle Fire Reaches HDX paying customers. The reps know they’re helping tech reviewers and other folks fortunate enough to try the tablet before its release, and they’re presumably not yet besieged by service requests. But if Amazon can keep the high quality of assistance and the hold times short – the company says que customers in the U.S. will be served by stateside staffers – Mayday will be a feature worth celebrating .
for the content you consume on the HDX Fire, Amazon’s thinking is not tough to figure in October The company knows that great selections of stuff for consumption are in danger of Becoming a commodity – especially since it offers its own apps for buying and Accessing Amazon content on other brands of tablets. So it’s trying to build the best software for doing the consuming. That’s the philosophy behind FreeTime, an ambitious set of features for managing your kids what’s on the Kindle, and Goodreads, the social network for avid readers, now owned by Amazon, Which will be built into Fire OS 3.1.
Amazon
X-Ray, Which annotates content so you can learn more about it on the fly, has been beefed up. For movies and TV shows, it now features trivia about the scene you’re watching and Identifies any background songs. And X-Ray for music, new in Fire OS 3.0, shows the lyrics songs play. X-Ray is available only for select content: Thousands of books and videos and have of Thousands of songs, According to Amazon, but When It’s there, it’s a unique benefit Kindle.
The
before, folks who pay $ 80 a year to join Amazon Prime get additional content for Their Kindle at the additional cost. Membership entitles you to unlimited streaming of 41,000 movies and TV shows – similar to Netflix, but with a different selection – and you can now download Them to the tablet for watching when you’re disconnected from the Internet, such as During plane trips. Prime members can Also check out one e-book a month from the lending library of 350,000 titles.
Amazon
(As long as you’re giving Amazon more money, you may want to consider buying its Origami Case, the Fire HDX’s flagship accessory. Though obviously inspired by the iPad’s Smart Cover, it’s clever in its own right: Hinges and magnets let you fold the cover flap into a pyramid-like stand que can prop up the tablet in either portrait or landscape orientation. It does seem a tad pricey, though, at $ 50 for $ 65 or polyurethane for leather.)
The Kindle Fire’s HDX content weakest link is the area where the iPad and Android tablets are typical strongest: apps. Amazon’s AppStore offers almost 100,000 of Them, Nearly double what it did a year ago but only around a tenth of the wares in Google Play, the Android app market that’s unavailable to Kindle owners. It’s true que many of the hundreds of Thousands of no-shows are schlock you would not want anyhow, but some of the absentees are Significant. Google apps such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Gmail and Google+ are unavailable. So are Netflix and Dropbox and SkyDrive and WhatsApp and SnapChat and Candy Crush Saga and Numerous other hits from the iPad and garden-variety Android tablets.
Another downside: The Fire HDX, polished though it is, remains less customizable than other tablets, leaving it with a slightly impersonal feel. Like previous Kindles, it comes with a marketing feature Amazon calls Special Offers, and Which you’ll call “full-screen ads que Appear each team I turn on my Kindle.” Even if you pay $ 15 to turn off Them, you can ‘t specify your own lock-screen photo – you get abstract imagery chosen by Amazon – or choose the wallpaper home-screen backdrop. Also Fire OS does not support the desktop widgets que are a highlight of plain-vanilla Android, and the ability to group apps and other content into custom folders will only arrive When version 3.1 does.
If
life with an Amazon-centric tablet sounds unduly limiting, that’s a reasonable stance and there’s no need to fret. The Same you’d plunk down $ 229 for the Fire HDX will get you Google’s impressive Nexus 7. The Kindle content-consumption bonuses such as X-Ray are missing, but it’s got two cameras and access to full-blown Android and the Google Play store in its entirety, plus compatibility with Chromecast. And the $ 329 iPad Mini, with its bigger screen, high-end industrial design and still-unbeatable app library, is another fine option, though its low-resolution screen grows more anachronistic by the minute. (Here’s hoping the Retina version is on its way.)
But if you buy into the basic proposition que Amazon is offering, I think you’ll like the Kindle Fire HDX. And stay tuned: The Fire OS 3.1 update, with TV connectivity and other features, make the HDX Should feel like a new tablet all over again just a few weeks after its launch. More thoughts on que software once it’s arrived.
No comments:
Post a Comment