The Kindle Fire Sucks

Authors Note – This review is for the original Kindle Fire not the HD series.

I apologize for the quality of the pictures. There isn't a screenshot function built into the Fire.

I got my hands on the Kindle Fire several months ago and I honestly thought it was a winner but since that time I’ve become more and more disgusted with the device and Amazon for putting out such a subpar product. It’s possible that my expectations have been ruined by Apple who at least puts out a dependable product that I’ve used successfully for years but my god has the Fire become a disappointment. They have a good looking product and a decent version of Android albeit modified but they have completely failed to make it useable and they’ve failed to take advantage of over the air updates to make it useable.

It’s usually pretty easy to write a negative review, just look at websites like Rotten Tomatoes but this is honestly a piece of cake. It hurts me to say that something from Amazon sucks but the Kindle Fire is a piece of crap. I think Amazon agrees or else I don’t think they would have flooded the market with several new variations of the Kindle Fire and while I haven’t gotten my hands on those I can tell you I’m already looking at the Nexus 7 because the Fire ruined my desire for any Amazon tablet.

The biggest issue that I’ve discovered with the Kindle Fire is that it constantly freezes and most of the time will require a hard reboot which takes longer than any other device I’ve experienced. Then you’d get it rebooted for it to just do it again. This made watching Netflix, Hulu+ or tasks that my Android powered phone doesn’t even break a sweat at (such as internet radio) impossible or at the very least unpleasant. It would also get very hot attempting to do these tasks to the point where I didn’t want to hold it anymore. Did they get the name Fire from what the original product testers started to yell after setting it down on paper?

The Kindle Fire default screen.

My second gripe with the Fire is that there are no external buttons except the power button. You are forced to use the android dropdown menu to adjust everything or to access more settings and that becomes a pain and with the freezing issues it makes turning the music down nearly impossible. Keep in mind that I use the dropdown menu on my HTC Thunderbolt daily to adjust multiple things but like any decent electronic of the 21st century it came with volume buttons.

Was I spoiled or is this thing just that bad?

I let several other people try their hand at the Fire to see if I was doing something wrong. I was really trying to see if they could get it to work. The results were sadly the same and the device left a really bad taste in everyone’s mouth and most walked away from it wanting to throw it against the wall and while the Fire is cheap it isn’t that cheap. It has the potential to be a great device but it seems that Amazon was more concerned with getting a cheap tablet out to the masses rather than putting out a quality product and they must be doing that well considering the numbers of devices they’ve sold. I’ve checked for updates as recently as last night and Amazon still hasn’t addressed these issues and it makes me wonder if they’re going to abandon their flagship device to simply focus on the HD series of Fire tablets.

It is an inexpensive tablet but it cost less than my phone and my phone works perfectly so I have a hard time trying to understand why the Fire is just so bad. It looks cool, comes in cool packaging and has a pretty unique interface that I would love to try out if it worked properly. I will say that its one high point is that it has a great keyboard that works great on the 7 inch screen. It just hasn’t been able to meet my expectations and I had to continually lower them for the Fire. I might be spoiled from the original iPad that I still sport but that doesn’t excuse this devices piss poor performance.

I’m sorry Amazon but the Kindle Fire sucks.

*PS* Amazon I know you own Alexa so please be merciful and don’t shoot my ranking in the face.