I realized that while I've reviewed the regular Kindle on my blog, I haven't reviewed the Kindle Fire yet, so here it goes.
The Fire was a lot heavier than I expected it to be. That's the thing that's stuck with me the longest since I got it last fall. I was actually shocked by the weight. It also comes with a cord that only plugs into the wall, not into a computer, but if you have a regular Kindle cord, it works just fine.
I've taken it into the kitchen to display recipes while I've attempted to cook. I've also used it to stream movies while I'm in the kitchen working. The small size is very good for this, not so easy to read recipes, however.
Downloading content or streaming movies is easy and it does this well.
I like reading books on the Fire. I've actually become so accustomed to reading on back-lit screens that I had trouble with the regular, e-ink Kindle not lighting up. Sometimes the page doesn't turn right away and it takes more than one tap, but it's a minor inconvenience.
The rest of my problems with the Fire are more annoying. Because of the small screen real estate, it's sometimes very difficult to tap links. Even increasing the resolution doesn't always help and I ended up buying a stylus. It's helped a lot, but there's another frustrating tapping issue--anything near the edges of the screen is less sensitive than I'd like. Just hooking the little caret at the bottom to pull up the menu can be a challenge.
What drives me absolutely crazy, though, is that it keeps freezing up when I'm using it to surf the web and there is no way to unfreeze it without rebooting. It happens all the time, usually 3 times a week and that's too much.
Worse than that was the time my Fire wouldn't start up at all. I found instructions on how to fix it in the Amazon forums, but this shouldn't happen to begin with.
Overall: The Fire is okay, but I wish I'd waited and gotten the iPad.
2.5 stars.
