The good: Seamless experience with Amazon's digital content services; great Web browser; curated Android app store includes must-have apps; ultra-affordable price tag; exceptional screen for its price.
The bad: Lacks 3G, cameras, microphone, GPS and location services; paltry 8GB internal storage; no Bluetooth; limited parental control; fewer apps than Apple's or Google's app stores; screen could be brighter.
The bottom line: Though it lacks the tech specs found on more expensive Apple and Android tablets, the US$199 Kindle Fire is an outstanding entertainment value that prizes simplicity over techno-wizardry.
Review:
In the world of tablets, there are great products and there are cheap products, but very few great, cheap products. Fortunately, for those of you unwilling to shell out US$500 for an Apple iPad 2, and wary of buying a piece of junk, Amazon's US$199 Kindle Fire tablet should be at the top of your wish list.
The Kindle Fire is not the best tablet we've seen this year, but we have to give credit to Amazon for seeing something that no other manufacturer--not even Apple--was able to grasp. When you look at the gap between what tablets are capable of doing, and what people actually use them for, you'll find that most people just want to be entertained.
The Kindle Fire is here to entertain us, and at US$199, we suspect many will take Amazon up on the offer. If you need a tablet that can keep up with your jet-setting, spreadsheet-editing, video-chatting lifestyle, we can point you to a few dozen better options. For the rest of you, read on.
Design
The Kindle Fire is a tablet with a 7-inch screen, giving it a similar look and feel as the RIM BlackBerry Playbook orSamsung Galaxy Tab 7. It runs a heavily modified version of Google's operating system and includes 8GB of internal memory.
The Kindle Fire (left) uses a 7-inch screen that is roughly half the area of the Apple iPad 2. We prefer the iPad's larger screen for Web browsing, reading magazines, and watching videos, but we also like the idea of saving US$300.
With it, you can read e-books using Amazon's popular Kindle software, download Android apps and games using Amazon's Appstore, purchase music using Amazon's MP3 store, and watch videos using Amazon's video on-demand and download services. The common thread here is that Amazon's digital stores and services are all loaded and ready to go out of the box. In fact, there's no getting around them since they're baked into the home screen navigation.
Source cnet
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