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Amazon apps
The home page also has tabs to jump straight to a newsstand, books, music, video, documents, apps or the web. Media links generally take you a bookshelf of your items, with cloud and device tags, and an arrow giving one-touch access to Amazon’s store, where you can purchase more stuff without any further sign-in.
The video experience is sure to be one of the Fire’s most popular features, and not just because the Fire comes with a month of Prime (Amazon’s £49/year free delivery service), including access to thousands of streaming videos. Buying a film or TV show is straightforward, with progress bars detailing progress for download and streams starting in a matter of seconds. Rentals are a generous 48 hours rather than Apple’s 24.
The Fire’s widescreen ratio means that Hollywood films are not actually that much smaller than super-letterboxed vids on the iPad, and speedy scrub and 10-second replay controls are a nice touch. Audio and video quality vary from stream to stream, of course, but generally we found them to be well encoded. However, there is no way to share content to a TV.
Sound and reading
The music player is a less exciting than videos, with a clunky transition from your library, to your cloud player, to the store, but sound quality through headphones (not supplied) was absolutely first class. It was also very easy to download cloud purchases to the device.
The Kindle app will not please bibliophiles. Not only is it essentially identical to the standard Android app, it lacks the much-touted X-ray feature to be found on the Kindle Touch and the swish page turn animations from the iPad.
If the Docs tab seems a little out of place on such a consumer-focused gadget, bear in mind this is a holdover from earlier Kindles, designed to give basic access to PDF, MOBI and text files. And it is just that – very basic.
Email, found under the Apps tab, is better. The app renders HTML messages extremely well and very quickly, there’s a fast search box, and good multiple mail move and delete options. The Android standard keyboard won’t excite anyone but it’s fast and offers to autocomplete spelling without any fuss.
Web and other apps
Amazon’s Silk browser was meant to offer cloud-accelerated smarts and near-instant downloads of popular websites. Don’t believe the hype. Browsing is much slower than the iPad, slower than the Samsung 8.9 and even slower than some 4G Android phones we've tested. Very busy sites also throw the Fire into a bit of tizzy, with pinch-to-zoom slowing or hanging momentarily.
The 7-inch screen is fine for browsing in landscape mode, but flip to portrait and pages start to look very cramped indeed. On the plus side, Flash elements loaded reliably and Flash games played OK, although not with the sleek liquidity of Samsung’s latest tablets.
Amazon’s dedicated market has around 10,000 apps. That sounds limiting but actually most of the big players are represented, and the company does offer a free paid app every day. All the more annoying then, that the pre-loaded Facebook ‘app’ is little more than a link to its website. Genuine apps and games installed and ran just fine – the 1GHz TI OMAP chip handles itself well.
Power and storage
With just 6GB of accessible storage on-board, Amazon is clearly angling for users to embrace its cloud offerings. Any songs or books you buy from Amazon are stored for free in its Cloud Drive, and you can also synch up to 5GB of other music before you have to start paying. There’s no Bluetooth, so you can’t connect a hardware keyboard or sound dock, no GPS and no camera.
On the power side, the Fire will play videoss or surf for around five and a half hours before starting to pop up with intrusive battery alerts. Amazon supplies a charger but, annoyingly, not a simple standalone micro USB cable for side-loading content.
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