By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 05:05:00 +0000

Consider points below before buying Kindle Fire:
- Amazon confirmed that you cannot download anything to Kindle Fire when traveling outside US.
- Kindle Fire (or any other Kindle) doesn’t have microSD (or any other) card slot thus it is stuck with 6 GB USABLE internal storage unlike other tablets/ereaders that can get up to 32 GB card in to increase content capacity. Kindles are made to be almost like a “dumb terminal” of the past to make sure you’re tied up to Amazon’s storage on the web (for which you need Wi-Fi connection to get to) and you can only store content you get from Amazon there, not other files. Quoting Amazon on Kindle Fire: “Free cloud storage for all Amazon content”. Get it, Amazon content?
- The stats of how long the battery can last (Kindle Fire theory is 7.5 hours) are taken with Wi-Fi off. It will last about 3 hours if you use it to access content from their Cloud storage over Wi-Fi.
- Amazon can spy on your web activity through their new cloud-integrated web browser of Kindle Fire.
- VERY IMPORTANT – lack of microSD slot means that if you decide to”root” your Kindle Fire (or any other Kindle) you’ll have to “root” the actual device thus there will be no coming back. On other devices you can make it boot from a “rooted” microSD card and if you want to get back to the original Operating System you can just take out the card and reboot, and you can go back and forth between different images of various OS’s.
- Kindle Fire doesn’t have a camera.
- Kindle Fire has about 70% less usable screen area than iPad 2.
- Kindle doesn’t support eBooks in ePub format that is the most used format in the world.
- Kindle app store contains only Amazon approved apps and it does not include (and will not include) Netflix app that other tablets/ereaders have thus again you’re stuck with Amazon content only.
- Amazon says it will review every app in its Appstore for Fire compatibility, as part of an automated process. Rejected apps will include those that rely on a gyroscope, camera, WAN module, Bluetooth, microphone, GPS, or micro SD. Apps are also forbidden from using Google’s Mobile Services (and in-app billing), which, if included, will have to be “gracefully” removed. In terms of actual content, Amazon has outlawed all apps that change the tablet’s UI in any way (including theme- or wallpaper-based tools), as well as any that demand root access (it remains to be seen how the company will treat the root-dependent apps already in its store) – this is what “rooting” can help with.

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By: Anonymous