Sorry in advance if you’re already in love with your Kindle Fire, which began shipping on 14 November to customers in the US who preordered it, but this has to be written. Amazon’s Kindle Fire offers a weaker user experience than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus tablet, which I reviewed this week.
The Fire is a fine little tablet, weighing 14.6 ounces with a rectangular bearing and black matte finish. It runs custom Android. But after the requisite navigation learning curve, which is mercifully slight, I experienced a slight lag in trying to navigate from application to application or destination to destination by tapping. I had no such issues with the Plus, which weighs only 12.2 ounces and is encased in a metallic-gray plastic finish.
Think of it as the press-and-hold gesture on most tablets. But you shouldn’t have to press and hold to move from one application to the next. I had no such tapping lag on the Plus, which flitted away at a quick tap each time. Amazon’s top navigation menu was pretty fluid.
When applications load on the Fire, they load with the kind of delay I currently still see on my Motorola Droid X smartphone, which has a single-core 1GHz processor compared with the 1GHz dual-core chip on the Fire. Compare that to the Plus, which is based on Google’s Android 3.2 Honeycomb platform and drove applications well with the speedier 1.2GHz chip.
What you access is what you tap. You can create bookmarks and the Silk Web browser is really good at remembering where you’ve been before, a by-product of its syncing with Amazon’s cloud on the back end. Both tablets employ Google search.
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