The Amazon Kindle Fire: Benchmarked, Tested, And Reviewed
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Page 1:Meet Amazon's Kindle Fire
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Page 2:Quick Navigation Tour
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Page 3:Books And Documents: Not Quite An e-Book Reader...
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Page 4:Video And Music: Amazon Prime Members Rejoice
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Page 5:Amazon Appstore Is Not Android Market
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Page 6:The Shopping Experience: All About Amazon
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Page 7:Amazon Silk: Assisted Web Browsing (Sort Of)
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Page 8:Web Browsing: The Same Old Android Restrictions
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Page 9:TI's OMAP 4430: CPU And GPU Performance
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Page 10:An Experiment: Gaming Performance, Tegra 2-Porting
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Page 11:Storage Performance: Slightly Faster Than USB 1.0?!
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Page 12:Display Performance: IPS Confirmed
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Page 13:Display Performance Examined: Very Bright, So-So Gamut
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Page 14:Benchmark Results: Battery Life And Recharge Time
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Page 15:Benchmark Results: Real-World Performance
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Page 16:Benchmark Results: Wireless Performance
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Page 17:Awesome For Amazon Addicts
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Page 18:Appendix A: Background Information On Our Benchmarks
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Page 19:Appendix B: Notes For Kindle Fire Owners
Appendix A: Background Information On Our Benchmarks
Display Analysis
Before we start our rather rigorous benchmarking process, we disable dynamic brightness because it prevents us from getting an accurate and reproducible measurement of the display’s potential. Second, brightness is set to the highest value. If you don't use the same settings, your color gamut is going to look smaller than what our benchmarks show.
Second, even though mobile operating systems don't honor ICC color profiles, native color management does occur at the hardware level. When a GPU sends 10 different hues of blue to an LCD only capable of displaying three, the subpixels display the closest matching color. So, in a way, smartphones and tablets behave as if they’re using relative colorimetric rendering. For more information, read Tom's Hardware Benchmarks Inkjet Printer Paper!
With respect to gamma, understand that it doesn’t affect black or white performance, only midtones. If gamma is set too high, the midtones appear dark. If it's set too low, they're pale. Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft all recommend a gamma of 2.2. It's an arbitrary value carried over from the NTSC standard, but it was originally chosen because it allows colors to appear more natural in slightly dim environments.
Battery Life & Recharge Time
Testing a tablet’s battery life tends to be highly variable unless you control the entire experience from beginning to end. Cumulatively, touch gestures don’t have a great impact on battery life. The biggest factors are CPU/GPU processing, screen brightness, volume, and Wi-Fi use. In order to accurately measure battery life, I coded a script that automatically plays MP3s at 50% volume while browsing different Wikipedia pages every 12 minutes. This benchmark is probably overkill, but it gives you an idea of a worst-case scenario.
Very few sites go through the trouble of benchmarking recharge time. However, in my view, it's as important as battery life. Though, it's not necessarily desirable to have a fast recharging time. Ideally, you want a nice slow charge so that your battery lasts more than a few hundred charges. Rapid charge times keep you away from the wall socket longer, but in the long run it cuts down on the health of the battery. Usually, the rate of charge starts to slow down somewhere in the 80% to 95% range, which is why the charging time from 0% to 10% is faster than 90% to 100%.
Real-World Performance
Early on, we discovered how difficult it is to benchmark tablets.
Benchmarking responsiveness with a camera is the easiest approach. Of course, normal cameras don't cut it, since they only shoot at 29 FPS. That's unacceptable if you're trying to measure precise time differences. Going the stopwatch route is no better, due to human-introduced errors. As a result, we're using a 1000 FPS high-speed camera to measure performance. Since one frame equals one millisecond, it’s possible to measure timing with a high degree of accuracy.
Boot and launch times aren't as important as input lag in our view. However, we're defining input lag in a slightly different way from the manner it’s used in discussing display technology. Our focus is more on real-world usability. As such, we define input lag "as the time between pressing a key and text appearing on-screen." This tells you how fast a tablet is registering an action. Ideally, you want low input lag so that you don't feel the tablet stuttering as you type or click on buttons. The average college student has a reaction time of 200 milliseconds for visual stimuli, so that's really the target for which we look.
- 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