Kindle Fire HD 7", Dolby Audio, Wi-Fi

Reviews are useless without context, so let me tell you a little about why I bought this device: My experience before the Kindle Fire HD was with Apple devices supplied by my work (which is one reason why there are so many iPad comparisons below - plus, lets face it, a lot of people who read this review are trying to figure out if it's worth it to spend the extra $100 on an iPad Mini), and a Kindle Touch. I really enjoy using all of these devices, but since I try to keep work and home separate, I wanted a device of my own and was hesitant to shell out the $300+ for an iPad or iPad mini. After doing a lot of research, I decided on the Kindle Fire HD 7". I made that decision based on a number of things: 1) I'm an Amazon Prime user; 2) I watch Netflix and Hulu, 3) I checked the Amazon app store to make sure the main apps I want/need were there and they were; 4) I like that I can buy content on Amazon and watch it on essentially any device, and 5) I'm a huge audible audiobook user. I've now had the device for about 3 months and used it extensively. Here is my review: Overall: Depending on why you want this device, it's either a great buy or a mediocre buy. If you're using it just to consume media (music, videos, books, etc) it's fine. It can be great, in fact, if you stick to Amazon's services and/or Netflix and Hulu. If you're expecting something that can potentially function as a replacement for your laptop, like an iPad can, - look elsewhere. In the areas where iPad falls short of a laptop, either the iOS or a great app usually makes up the deficit. That is simply not the case with the Kindle Fire HD. I'm not unhappy with it per se, but I could definitely be happier. Bottom line: this is a media consumption, social networking and shopping (from Amazon) device. If those are your purposes, it's an overall good buy. I don't play games much, so I can't comment on that. The two biggest complaints I heard and/or saw for this device when doing my research are the ads and the buttons being hard to find. The ads: I turned off the carousel ads via settings (because they bothered me) but I still get the welcome screen ads and it's not worth the $15 to turn them off - I don't even notice them anymore. This really is a non-issue. Th buttons: I almost never use them. There is a volume slider in every app I've seen and I use a Kindle cover that puts the device to sleep when I close the cover flap. When I do use them they are never hard to find. Also a non-issue. 10 Pros - 1) Low entry price. You can buy a Kindle Fire HD 7", a nice leather case and about $25 worth of media/apps for less than the cost of an iPad Mini. 2) It's built well. This was a surprise. I liked my Kindle Touch very much, but it did feel like a cheap toy when I first pulled it out of the box. I didn't have that feeling with the Fire HD. 3) It's the perfect size. I have an iPad 2 and it's too big to read on, just uncomfortable. My iphone, on the other hand is too small to watch movies on for the most part. This is a perfect medium option. Perfect for books, acceptable for video. I'm not going running with it anytime soon, but I do listen to music on it when I'm stationary. It even fits in a cargo pocket 4) It has GREAT sound (far outperforms similar tablets on this point). My wife and I would occasionally sit in bed and try to watch a movie on the iPad, but even with no kids in the room it was often just about impossible to hear the movie on the iPad speaker. We simply don't have that problem on the Kindle. I knew this before I bought it because I watched a video on a Kindle Fire HD at a crowded Best Buy during the peak of the Christmas shopping season and heard it just fine. 5) I don't use this feature, but Kindle lets you set up profiles for kids restricting time and access to certain apps. I have 5 kids and I think this is a great feature. I just personally choose to not let them play with the device. 6) It's great for reading. Some people complain about not holding an actual book, but I have yet to meet one of those people who has tried reading an book on an e-reader with a case. The case makes all the difference in the world. It gives you the feel of a book, especially the leather cases and the satisfaction of closing it when you put it down or finish. It's dumb, but it's true. 7) I love the way it interfaces with Amazon's music, books, prime video, photo and audible services. It's seamless. 8) At the time I purchased it (Christmas 2012), display resolution was almost double that of competitor tablets in similar price range. To my knowledge, there are still no devices in the $200 price range that can touch Kindle Fire HD on display quality. 9) Battery life - I feel like I use this device all the time and I only charge it once a week. My iPad and iPhone need charging once a day. 10) As an Amazon Prime member I like the device a lot. When I need to buy, I always go to Prime first. I can usually save money and almost never pay shipping. When you have five kids, the convenience factor of being able to shop online, not pay for shipping and get it in 2 days (sometimes 1) is impossible to overstate. This device makes it almost unnecessary to logon to Amazon on my actual computer. I wish I could say that I'd tried to shop elsewhere with the device, but the truth is that aside from groceries - I buy almost everything from Amazon via my Prime account. 10 Cons: 1) Streaming video from sites besides Amazon prime, Netflix and Hulu is sketchy. I don't think this is a bandwidth issue - my internet is a very fast package and it works fine on my other devices. On YouTube for example, my iPhone does better on 3G than Kindle does on wifi, even with resolution turned down to low quality. I also tried comparing iPad w/ wi-fi to Kindle w/ wi-fi on YouTube and there is no contest. iPad killed it. I think this may be a google compatibility issue, because it works fine on the sites listed above. In fact, Kindle at times outperforms my iPad on Netflix. 2) Privacy - Apparently, Amazon collects info about which sites you visit via the built-in Silk browser so they can push more relevant content to you in the ads. This idea bugs me and there aren't any available alternative browsers in Kindle's App Store. You can choose to encrypt your data, but it slows things down when you browse. The talking point in the marketing collateral above says "designed for the web" or something to that effect, I think that's true from Amazon's perspective, but not from the consumer's. It's designed to capture data from the web to help the company sell products to the consumer. It's absolutely not designed for the best consumer experience when browsing the web - if it were, they'd give you a choice about which browser you'd like to use. 3) App availability - You don't have access to every Android app or the Google Play store. You do have access to thousands of apps, as they get approved by Kindle (including one free app a day, which I'll admit is pretty cool). You can circumvent this issue somewhat by installing an unapproved app that gives you access to a different free app market, but a lot of them don't work well (those using Google services, for example) and none of them are specific to Kindle Fire. For the most part, this limitation has been no big deal - I've almost always been able to find the app I'm looking for or something equivalent, but there have been enough exceptions to be annoying. Also for iOS there are iPad and iPhone variants of apps. The iPad versions tend to be more fully functional and often outshine the full website for whatever service you're using. In the event that no iPad native app exists, you can install the iPhone app. But when used that way, the apps "feel" like iPhone apps. Most of the Kindle Fire apps I've used "feel" like phone apps. E.g., they are less functional and designed for a phone sized screen. 4) Amazon's "skin" or interface is overlayed on top of Android and it is pretty restrictive in both functionality and interface. Frustratingly so, even for someone who is used to iOS which "advanced" users tend to complain about because functionality is limited. I'm also an advanced user, but I'm willing to put up with a more restrictive OS if, and only if, the OS is designed well enough that I don't miss the "advanced" features. For example, on iOS, I use my iPhone and iPad daily and I have NEVER missed having access to the file/directory structure (and if I did, I could get it by simply plugging the iPad into my computer). On Kindle I miss it pretty regularly and I simply HATE the carousel display. In fact, if I could turn off the carousel display I might be a lot happier. I have never been tempted to "jailbreak" my apple devices and wouldn't be even if they weren't the property of my employer. That's not true with Kindle. 5) Google services don't work with Kindle Fire. Google Finance, Drive, Docs, Reader, etc. will not work on Kindle - at least not via any Apps that I've found. I haven't tried to browse to them directly via the browser. Gmail will work, via Kindle's native mail app. 6) No rear facing camera or flash. Not a huge deal, but annoying nonetheless, especially with a device with such a great display - I would like to take pictures without either being in them or guessing what I'm aiming at. With Kindle Fire, you either guess and check or put yourself in the picture. Also, I don't want every pic I take added to the cloud and/or previewed in the Carousel. 7) I had to download special apps to do things it should do out of the box - certain video formats, for example, require an app to be installed. Mild annoyance and one you face with most devices, but still an annoyance. 8) There is no button (except power and volume) that is independent of the OS. So if something freezes, you can't just exit out short of killing the power or rebooting and it does freeze occasionally. I really, really miss the button at the bottom of most other devices. This is most noticeable when you're trying to watch video and it's stuttering. You can't even get to the pop-up menu to get to the "back" arrow or home button. 9) I despise the autocorrect. It's hard to describe exactly how annoying this feature is. The corrections are often wrong and I can't turn it off. I did figure out that I can add things manually, but who wants to have to do that?! A lot of people claim that you can't replace a computer with a tablet, but after having done so for my work for almost a year, I disagree. With the Kindle Fire, however, I can understand the claim. I hate typing on this thing because fighting the autocorrect is a constant annoyance. I didn't think this would be a big issue because I wasn't planning on doing any sort of document editing with it - but it's turned out to be quite a pain even with emails. 10) Reading at night, even with brightness turned all the way down can be retina searing. Oddly, Sepia mode seems to be less taxing on the eyes in a dark room than Night mode. There are apps you can use to turn it down even further, but I shouldn't have to install a special app to read comfortably on a device that is at least on the surface designed to be an e-reader.