Amazon Kindle Fire review

With all the fuss surrounding the launch of the Kindle Fire HD, it would have been easy to miss the fact that Amazon also announced another, cheaper Kindle Fire tablet. One with a less impressive spec list and lower resolution screen, but a slightly lower £129 price.

In fact, the standard Kindle Fire is an upgraded version of the tablet that has been selling so well in the US for the past year or so, but never made it to the UK. The tablet has a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, up from the 1GHz and 512MB of RAM of the original Fire, and it makes a big difference to performance.

In the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, the tablet managed a score of 1,767ms, up from around 2,500ms, and the whole interface feels much more pleasant to use. It must be noted, however, that as with the Fire HD, panning, scrolling and web browsing in the tablet’s integrated Silk browser still isn’t as smooth as it is on Google’s Nexus 7.

Physically, the Fire is identical to the previous tablet, but that’s no bad thing. We’re not talking Apple iPad Mini levels of sophistication; the tablet is a fairly fat 11.5mm thick, and weighs a rather dumpy 400g, but its blocky, rubbery rear feels very solidly made.

It also has the same lower screen resolution of 1,024×600 as the old model, which means text, images and video don’t look as crisp as they do on the likes of the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD. However, IPS technology ensures viewing angles are good and the brightness is enough at a maximum of 415cd/m2 that you’ll be able to read your books comfortably in most locations. We were impressed with the contrast ratio of 847:1, which makes for vibrant colours.

Don’t expect to be able to read comfortably on the beach in full sunshine, though – only an E Ink screen is easily readable in those conditions. It’s also important to remember that, as it isn’t an E Ink device, battery life won’t run into weeks and months. We had trouble with our usual battery benchmark but it managed well over five hours when streaming video from LoveFilm (see below).

The Fire is just as convenient to use as any Kindle. It’s an Android tablet at heart, running Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich, but with Amazon’s own user interface over the top. That means when you pull it out of its box and switch it on, there’s virtually no setup required. It’s already linked to your Amazon account, and any books or digital music you’ve already purchased on Amazon are only a click away.

Movies and TV shows are available via the Lovefilm Instant service for streaming and downloading – there’s a one month’s free subscription included so you can try before you buy, which is normally £4.99 per month. And as with a standard Android tablet, you can also install apps on the Kindle via the Amazon app store. However, there’s no support for the Google Play market, so your choice of apps is more limited and you won’t be able to run any Android apps you already own on the tablet.

That isn’t the only thing that’s annoying, though. The lock screen displays “special offers” whenever you switch it on unless you pay an extra £10 extra to turn it off. And we’re not keen on the limited specification. We can live without a camera on a tablet, but the lack of Bluetooth is a real problem for a device meant to be used for watching movies, listening to music and playing games.

The Kindle Fire only has 8GB of storage, which you’ll find quickly gobbled up by downloaded content, and there’s no expansion slot for adding to it. Any content purchased through Amazon can be removed from local storage and downloaded later, but we’d rather keep as much in local storage as possible.

The Kindle Fire isn’t a bad little tablet, but it’s simply too expensive; with the superior Kindle Fire HD costing only £30 more, you’d have to be on a very tight budget to opt for this model. Either way, the inflexible Amazon software and sluggish web browsing means we’d still recommend opting for the far superior Google Nexus 7 – only dedicated users of LoveFilm need think twice.