Amazon Kindle Fire: The Good and the Bad

The year’s most anticipated tablet, the Amazon Kindle Fire is finally ready for production. If you are in the US and are still contemplating if you need to preorder the Amazon Kindle Fire, I’ve put together a list of some of the good and bad points of the Amazon Kindle Fire, which might help you decide on whether to preorder one or not.

Amazon Kindle Fire: The Good

1. Vibrant Color Touchscreen

The Kindle Fire comes with a 7 inch vibrant color touchscreen that delivers 1024 x 600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi, in 16 million colors. It uses a technology called IPS (in-plane switching) that’s similar to the one that’s used on the iPad to allow for extra wide viewing. So your movies, magazines and books now come alive better than ever.

2. Glossy Magazines and Books at your Fingertips

You can download from over 100 popular magazines including Bon Appetit, Elle, Vanity Fair and more in glossy, full colored layouts to get the real magazine reading effect. What’s more some of the magazines even come with built-in audio, video, and other interactive features.

You can also download and read bestsellers, children’s books, comics, and cookbooks in vibrant color from the Kindle Store, which offers over 1 million books ranging from free ones to titles costing up to $9.99.

3. Free One Month Amazon Prime Membership

With over 100,000 movies and TV shows and counting ready for instant download and one month of free Amazon Prime services for users who have not used Amazon Prime before, this is one of the best deals to come out of the Amazon package. Amazon Prime provides access  to unlimited, ad-free streaming of over 10,000 movies and TV shows at $79, but will be made available for free when users first activate and register their Kindle Fire.

4. Automatically Sync Books and Videos

Amazon’s Whispersync technology not only lets you automatically sync your library, last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across your Kindle devices, but also extends this feature to all your video views such as movie streaming or a TV show you discontinued in between.

5. Access all your Webmail in One Place

Although there’s been lots of talk about the absence of a default email app in the Kindle Fire, there will be a default email app that will enable you to access your webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and others from a single app interface. You can also access additional email apps from the Amazon Appstore for Android.

6. Apps from the Android Appstore

The Amazon Appstore for Android contains popular games and apps that you can download on the Kindle Fire with an additional free paid app thrown in everyday.

7. Powerful Processing

The Kindle Fire features a state-of-the-art 1 GHz TI OMAP dual-core processor for fast, powerful performance that will make your movie streaming and downloading experience a breeze.

8. Free Cloud Storage

The Kindle Fire comes only with 8 GB internal memory which might be a turn off for many. But the fact that Amazon lets you store your books, movies, music and apps in the Amazon Cloud for free ensures that the 8 GB constraint is trivialized.

9. Revolutionary Web Browsing Experience

The Kindle Fire also features a revolutionary cloud-accelerated browser called Amazon Silk that enhances the web browsing experience. It uses a split browser architecture, meaning that the Silk browser software sits on both the Kindle Fire as well as the Amazon server to leverage the power of the Amazon Web Services cloud. Plus it even supports Adobe® Flash® Player.

10. Great Features at an Incredible Price

If you are an Amazon Junkie and make use of many of the premium Amazon services, the Kindle Fire, priced at a meager $199 might be a pretty good buy.

Amazon Kindle Fire: The Bad

The Kindle Fire is no replacement for the iPad. If you expect to see all the top features of the iPad on the Kindle fire, you will be disappointed. But hey, that’s why there’s a different price tag. Here are some of the features you’re not likely to see when the Kindle Fire is shipped this November.

1. No Camera.

2. Only 8 GB internal storage, although compensated amply by the ability to store Amazon digital content on the Amazon cloud.

3. Chances are that with the new Amazon Silk web browser, your browsing usage may be monitored by Amazon because web connections from your tablet are linked directly to the Amazon server. Apparently, Amazon reserves the right to retain the Kindle Fire ID and URLs visited for up to 30 days. But that’s a privacy concern that big companies often flirt with and even get away with in certain cases.

4. No 3G. Kindle Fire is to be currently shipped with only Wi-Fi.

5. You will not have access to the stock Android Market which houses over 200,000 apps. Instead you’ll have to contend with the 10, 000 or so apps from the Amazon Android Appstore.

6. Hot new Android apps that are compatible with the latest Android Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich may not be compatible with the Kindle Fire.

7. No microphone.

Finally take a visual tour of the Amazon Kindle Fire here and remember that all said, the Kindle Fire has not been released and most reviews are limited to the few who have had access to the product for a limited time. It remains to be seen if the Kindle Fire will indeed prove a tablet worth buying as an alternative to the iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab when it launches in the US on November 15, 2011.