The Fire HD: More Soot Than Sparks - New York Times

I’m not exactly sure what’s been seeping into the water supply at ’s Seattle offices, but it’s making the executives a little loopy.

They’re hailing Amazon’s new touch-screen tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, as “the best tablet at any price.”

Well, let’s see now. The Fire HD has no camera on the back, no GPS navigation, no speech recognition, no to-do list or notes app. It trails the in thickness, screen size, screen sharpness, Web speed, software polish and app availability. It can only dream of the iPad’s universe of accessories, cases and docks.

Now, read my lips: The Kindle Fire HD is not a disappointment. It’s not! Or it won’t be, once Amazon finishes polishing the software.

The prices are the lowest ever; $200 for the 7-inch screen, $300 for the 8.9-incher, $500 for the 8.9-incher with cellular Internet ($50 for the first year, $15 a month thereafter). The prices go up by $15 if you wish to eliminate the full-screen ads for books and movies that appear on the “sleep” screen.

In each case, that’s either much less expensive than similarly equipped rivals, or much better equipped than similarly priced ones.

The 7-inch Fire HD, the one I tested, will be available on Sept. 24; the larger models arrive in late November.

These Fires shoot off plenty of sparks. The biggest one is the “HD” â€" the screens are better than the first-generation Fires, very bright and very sharp. Amazon also says that they have a wider viewing angle than before. Great, although who complains about viewing angles on a 7-inch screen that you hold directly in front of you?

Incidentally, despite the name “HD,” the screen can’t actually show you movies in hi-def. It may have the requisite number of pixels, but most of them are dedicated to black letterbox bars; the screen is the wrong shape for movies. And you can’t enlarge the playback to fill the screen, as you can on an iPad.

These Fires also have mini-HDMI jacks. With the proper cable (not included), you can hook the tablet up to a TV, for excellent picture and sound. It works great. (You can send an iPad’s image to a TV, too â€" wirelessly, in fact â€" but only if you buy an Apple TV for $100.)

The Fire’s sound rocks. Its stereo speakers (“with Dolby audio”) blast out much better, richer sound than any of its monaural competitors. The battery life is fine â€" more than eight hours, according to Consumer Reports. Most models come with 16 gigabytes of memory â€" twice what’s on the rival Google Nexus or Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, although the Nook has a memory-card slot for expansion.

Amazon has fixed the problems that plagued the original Kindle Fire’s first-generation software. The home screen â€" a scrolling “carousel” of icons representing the most recently viewed videos, books, apps and so on â€" now moves fluidly, with just the right amount of animated momentum. Taps usually register on the first try.

And reading magazines, which once felt like an arm-wrestling match with intrusion-happy programmers, is now a graceful, effortless experience. In most magazines, you can zoom in to a layout for more legible type, or double-tap for a vertically scrolling text-only view. (Unfortunately, some magazines, like The New Yorker, use their own navigation systems; you wind up having to learn different reading systems.)

The Fires are intended to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem of music, movie, TV and e-book stores â€" which they do exceedingly smoothly. Movies, books and even certain games remember your place as you move from gadget to gadget. Anything you buy from Amazon is stored online, for redownloading whenever you like. And Amazon’s Prime membership ($79 a year) gets you a free book a month, 5,000 free streaming movies and free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases.

Amazon movies don’t offer subtitles or captions. Some of them, however, now offer something called X-ray: you can tap to summon biographies of whatever actors are in the current scene. Cool, occasionally.

Those are some of the sparks. There is also, alas, a lot of soot.

For example, Amazon trumpets the Fire’s dual Wi-Fi antennas â€" a first in a tablet â€" which is supposed to give you a better, faster Internet signal.

Well, fine, but the Fire still lags the iPad in Web browsing. It took my Fire one second longer than the iPad to pull up nytimes.com or ESPN.com (seven seconds versus six), four seconds longer for People.com, three seconds longer for Cracked.com â€" and, amusingly, 1.5 seconds longer to pull up Amazon.com.

There’s a camera on the front, but no camera app to use with it. Until someone writes software for it, you can’t take a picture or record video. Amazon says that for now, it’s for use only with Skype for video calling.

Most urgently of all, Amazon should tackle the apps problem. The Fire still lacks built-in apps for navigation, notes, to-do lists, alarm clock or stopwatch.

Amazon says more than 30,000 apps are available for the Fire, but they include only a fraction of my iPad favorites. For example, I couldn’t find Dropbox, Bump, Flixster, Echofon, Voxer, Flight Track Pro, Nest, Jot Not, Google Voice, Google Search or Taxi Magic.

Finally, there are the bugs. Once again, Amazon seems to have scrambled for the holidays, with the intention of polishing its software later.

Everything lags a bit; some apps take seven or eight seconds to open. The Gmail sign-up wizard has bugs; Draw Something’s screen appears upside-down and won’t rotate upright; and turning a magazine page or zooming in produces blurry, blotchy text. It takes the gasping processor a couple of seconds to catch up with the sharp text you’re expecting.

Some things take too many steps. You can’t open your bookmarks list from a Web page â€" only from the Starter screen of Web thumbnails, which takes four steps to reach.

One extremely promising advertised feature is missing entirely: individual accounts for your children, with parent-governed time limits for each activity (movies, games, reading and so on). Next month, says Amazon.

Over all, the tablet feels professional and elegant, but it still exhibits a few of the goofy hardware design decisions that have plagued Amazon since Kindle 1.0. For example, the tiny volume and power buttons are black like the case, unlabeled and flush with the edge so you can’t feel them. When you want to change the volume, you have to turn the tablet on edge to study them, preferably with a flashlight and a map.

The Fire doesn’t come with a wall charger; that’s $10 extra at purchase time, or $20 later. Without it, you have to charge from a computer’s USB jack â€" and even then, the Kindle doesn’t charge unless it’s asleep or its brightness is turned down. (Rival tablets charge just fine from the same jacks.)

This week, Amazon also introduced new versions of its traditional black-and-white, for-books-only Kindles, each spectacular in its own way. The PaperWhite has built-in illumination, like Barnes & Noble’s GlowLight model but with slightly more even lighting and a lower price ($120, with ads). And the basic, no-frills Kindle costs only $70, the lowest ever. Last year’s Kindle Fire is still available, slightly upgraded, for $160.

And, of course, there are other great small tablets from Google, Samsung â€" and soon Apple, if you believe the rumors.

But the Kindle Fire HD models are attractive, confident viewers of movies, TV shows, Web pages and books. They tap into Amazon’s increasingly appealing online world of entertainment and information stores. And above all, they make the Kindle Fire’s industry-leading features-per-dollar ratio even more top-heavy.

But “the best tablet at any price?” Hmmm. Somebody should put a call in to the Seattle water inspectors.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2012

An earlier version of this column misstated the current prices for Apple TV and for last year’s Kindle Fire. Apple TV is $100, not $80; the Kindle Fire, slightly upgraded, is $160, not $170. The column also referred incorrectly to the memory features of rival products. While the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet has a memory card for expansion, the Google Nexus does not.