Comments on: What’s Better: Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ or New Apple iPad?

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 05:45:00 +0000

I’ve had the fire hd 7, the ipad mini, kindle paperwhite, and now as of today the fire hd 8.9. I’m far from an apple guy, in fact after owning an apple laptop maybe 6 years back I vowed to avoid apple like the plague. With that being said I’ve recently been in the market for a tablet to be used primarily for PDF viewing but let’s face it movies and books are definitely a nice bonus! After the fire hd 7 proved to be just a bit too small and paperwhite was a disaster for pdf viewing I gave apple another shot. The ipad mini handled pdf so much better than the fire in a lot of little ways which to me added up to a far more fluid user experience. I find the scrolling to be smoother on the ipad overall, not just with pdf but even with the UI, the fire hd’s both have a bit of stuttering when swiping the UI, it’s subtle but noticable to me. PDFs can be opened in Safari natively, amazon’s silk browser would not open my pdfs, On one site I frequent I couldn’t navigate the menu properly with the silk browser, furthermore when I typed my username at the site in order to download a pdf the fire switched the first letter of my user name to uppercase whenever switched to type a number, this caused several failed logins until I figured out what was up. In the end I had to send the pdf to kindle from my pc .Frustrating experince. The Ipad also supports veritcal scrolling in pdf as well, which frankly turned out to be a huge deal for me, the kindle fire only supported horizontal scrolling for pdf. I like the build quality on the ipad as well. I gave Jeff Bezos two shots with these fires, all in all they aren’t bad devices, they’re really nice actually. I’m a prime member and have a lot of respect for Jeff but let’s call it like it is, the ipad mini is just the more polished device and in enough little ways that I think it will remain that way for a long time. For my personal usage scenario it’s definitely worth the extra money.

By: Hope

Hope — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:36:00 +0000

Ditto… Try the nexus 10

By: JS

JS — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:52:00 +0000

Let me take that point by point.

First of all, the iPad mini isn’t a 7″ tablet. It’s too big for that designation.

The Nexus 7 has a 1280×800 display at 216 PPI, the iPad mini is 1024×768 at 163 PPI. That’s not barely higher res, that’s a very significant swing in favor of the Nexus and very easily noticeable.

The build quality of the 7, and even of the first gen Fire, is as good as the iPad. To say differently is not to have used the devices.

The nexus 7 puts up DOUBLE the numbers of the full 3rd gen iPad, which in turn puts up better numbers than the mini. Performance goes to the 7.

There are actually more apps in the Play market than the App store now.

Usable screen area is just a way of saying it has a bigger screen. Which is fair enough, however in this particular market, the bigger screen is a detriment since it makes the device less portable.

By: Idon't Know

Idon't Know — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:22:00 +0000

None of that is true. All the other 7 inch tablets are barely higher res, not enough to notice,have much poorer build quality, performance, apps, and usable screen area.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:45:00 +0000

The Kindle (4G version) is available in a 64 gb version.

By: RO

RO — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:32:00 +0000

Seems like the Barnes & Noble Nook HD+ matches both closely in a lot of respects, and beats them handily in storage by taking micro SD cards up to 32GB for a huge storage price advantage (and flexibility – swap cards ad infinitum) .

YMMV

By: JS

JS — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:16:00 +0000

I’d never make the recommendation for the mini. The screen is too low res to be a comfortable reader, too big to be pocketable and too small to serve the iPad function.