If you are in the market for a brand new tablet, there’s a good chance you have probably considered purchasing Amazon’s Kindle Fire. While it’s not meant to perform heavy duty tasks like 3D model design and hosted pbx, the Kindle has been touted by some as the ultimate media consumption device. With access to the Amazon store and a virtually unlimited amount of media to purchase, the Kindle can also become a goldmine for the company.
A recent study from Nielson Norman Group found that the browser crashes more often than Internet Explorer, the touchscreen buttons are too small and unresponsive, and the overall UX was extremely poor. Amazon set out to create a tablet “for the people,” but came up short when actually taking into consideration the people who were actually going to use the product.
Early reports and reviews are blasting the Kindle Fire as an inefficient and clunky tablet experience. According to a review on Huffington Post, the physical features are some of the most poorly executed atrocities ever seen on a mobile device. There are not enough external buttons which forces users to control their device with the inefficient and slow options available on the touchscreen.
The silk-browser, with its cloud based services, was supposed to be the ultimate consumer experience. Unfortunately, test groups said that the 7 inch screen makes browsing the Internet a chore. Because mobile sites are usually designed with smartphone screens or ten inch tablets in mind, the Kindle Fire suffers a usability crisis. Websites either look too sparse or totally crammed together when viewing.
One of the most unfortunate things about the Kindle Fire is that there is currently no option for 3G or 4G access. Users have to be in a wireless hotspot in order to use many of the cloud based features the device promised. There is a 3G version of Amazon’s original Kindle available on the market so it makes little sense not to have it on their more expensive and Internet capable model.
With all of the obvious faults of the Kindle Fire, it is still running at the low price of $199. Consumers in a weak economy will go so far as to make an impulse purchase with the Kindle Fire because Amazon is selling it for such a low price. While the price may be low, if you want to purchase one for a techie friend or relative, cough up a little more cash for a Samsung Galaxy or iPad 2.
The voip services Amazon uses in their call centers to handle customer complaints should be fully activated right after the holiday season when consumers want to return their Kindle Fire gifts. If Amazon’s sole goal was to sell digital products on their marketplace, they may have found a quick way to accomplish it.
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