Music
Multimedia is what sets the Fire apart from Amazon's e-ink-based products. The Kindle Keyboard and Touch both support MP3 playback, but that isn't their core competency. Low capacity forgettable audio quality mean you'll probably look to products like the Fire for more a more enjoyable experience.
Music app: "Shop this artist" Link
Music app
Amazon uses the stock music player from Android 2.3, which will make it familiar to those of you with a Gingerbread-based smartphone. The company tweaked its interface, though, so you can shop for music within the app. This works flawlessly, provided your ID3 tags are correct.
Video: On Demand
The Kindle Fire excels at video, with one small caveat. Amazon is really using the device to push its streaming Instant Video service. Unfortunately, this isn't free.
If you're a Prime member, you won't have to pay for content tagged as Prime Instant Video. However, not all movies and TV shows fall into this category, which is why you should check out the selection on Amazon before you spend on a Prime membership.
The playback interface is very simple. You can seek within a track, change the volume, rewind 10 seconds, pause, and play. The screenshots may seem a little dark, but that's only because the controls are overlaid on top of the video image. Second, there's a slight black gradient effect to provide better contrast.
Interestingly, all of the video-on-demand (VOD) content is HTML5. On a desktop computer, Amazon streams Flash video. Presumably, this is to save on battery life.
It's only possible to play video from Amazon's VOD service in landscape mode, which suits us just fine.
There is one quirk where flipping the orientation after starting a video results in an upside-down control interface. The only way to fix this is to completely stop playback by hitting the back button and resume playback.
Video: Local Files
Nothing prevents you from playing locally-stored video. However, the Fire only has 5 GiB of user-accessible space, some of which you'll have to set aside for the apps you want to install. Of course, there's also the matter of music and e-books. You might get one or two high-quality movie rips onto the Fire, tops.
Interestingly, there aren't any orientation issues during local video playback.
I haven't experimented much with specific codecs or file extensions. We only use H.264-encoded MP4 video files in the lab, simply because they're compatible across all platforms. With that said, you need to install a program like mVideoPlayer if you want MKV support (see Appendix B).
If you're a movie buff, be aware you can't play any video file larger than 2 GB. Oddly, we encountered a similar problem on HP's TouchPad. It's not clear if there's a link. Both tablets use a FAT32 file system architecture, so the maximum file size should be 4 GB. But, while our 2.8 GB Blu-ray rip is detected, it won't play back.
- Meet Amazon's Kindle Fire
- Quick Navigation Tour
- Books And Documents: Not Quite An e-Book Reader...
- Video And Music: Amazon Prime Members Rejoice
- Amazon Appstore Is Not Android Market
- The Shopping Experience: All About Amazon
- Amazon Silk: Assisted Web Browsing (Sort Of)
- Web Browsing: The Same Old Android Restrictions
- TI's OMAP 4430: CPU And GPU Performance
- An Experiment: Gaming Performance, Tegra 2-Porting
- Storage Performance: Slightly Faster Than USB 1.0?!
- Display Performance: IPS Confirmed
- Display Performance Examined: Very Bright, So-So Gamut
- Benchmark Results: Battery Life And Recharge Time
- Benchmark Results: Real-World Performance
- Benchmark Results: Wireless Performance
- Awesome For Amazon Addicts
- Appendix A: Background Information On Our Benchmarks
- Appendix B: Notes For Kindle Fire Owners










Ummm.... what?
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
Ummm.... what?
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
Just give him the 6990, the poor fellow just wants to play BF3.
Ever heard of bots? There're tons of those on Tom's nowadays.
A GPU of a 560 Ti level maxes it out @ 1080p, no need for a 6990.
Back to topic...
ROFL, and who needs a tablet without all that? That's right, Amazon fanboys. That company is an utter POS that is not unlike Apple, designing underpowered useless products and delivering them as "innovative". The only "innovative" thing here is a complete dependency on the company's online services... oops, nevermind, Apple did it first
And do not say "ya, but you can root it!!!". That's nice, people can jailbreak their iPads. You cannot include rooting and jailbreaking when you talk about something being open
The Fire doesn't have either of those things. Not going to work. You should check out the specs of the Fire first.
Oh yeah? You bought a Fire?
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
This article is a big fail.. they should have included it to compare.
Just sayin...
You can say the same thing with the Ipad and the Itunes store. Except for the fact that Amazon isn't making money with just selling the Kindle Fire alone.
Still though I like both the Ipad and Kindle Fire.
Also, I want to elaborate on the GPU. The OMAP 4430's SGX540 runs at 300MHz, not 200MHz, so those figures are a little misleading.
It seems like a good product from Amazon, but for my expected use, it isn't sufficient. I mainly use my iPod touch to read comics in JPEG format, so not being able to install many apps + having limited space really hurts.
Glad you liked it! Most of the time I cringe when the table discussion turns to tablets. A lot of tech reviewers aren't even really technies. They come from a Communication background, which is why the Fire is always pitted in a iPad 2 fight. Plus, the investors want the Apple fight cause they only see things in terms of units sold.
The engineers and consumers want a comparison based on features and usability. And the executives and PR people want a comparison based on demographics.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. For me, this tablet is very attractive, but then again, I like amazon. If you're not part of that crowd, it's a harder purchase to justify in the long run.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com