TOUCH TABLET and CELL PHONE

The Kindle Fire HD 7" retains much of what was good about the first Fire. It’s still tightly interwoven with your Kindle account and makes gobbling up loads of Amazon-delivered content easier than ever.
It’s all that’s different about this new tablet, though, that sets it apart. First of all, though it’s a 7-inch, the device is actually larger than both the original Fire and competitive 7-inch tablets like the Google Nexus 7 . Part of this is because the Kindle Fire HD puts its camera on the landscape side of the device, while the Nexus 7 puts it on the portrait edge. This makes the Kindle Fire HD almost a half-inch wider than the first Fire and the Nexus 7 (the Fire HD’s screen is just a couple of eights wider than the original Fire).


Despite being larger than the first Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 , Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD 7" is actually, at 13.9 ounces, a smidge lighter than the original, and is not uncomfortable to hold or use. The somewhat boxy design has been replaced by a collection of rounded edges and more pronounced curves. The single button is gone. Now there are three: one for power and two for volume control. None of them stick out and it’s almost impossible to hit one by accident. This is an obvious improvement over the first Fire, though I still prefer the iPad’s more visible and easier-to-access home button to all other tablet options.

On the old Fire, you couldn’t find the tinny-sounding speakers. The new Fire HD sports a pair of speaker grilles on the back. Underneath are two powerful, Dolby Digital-controlled speakers that pump out surprisingly rich audio. There simply is no comparison to the old Fire. The Nexus features comparable audio, but from only one side of its body.

The Real Competition

Google’s Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HD, by the way, share the same 1,280 x 800 resolution. From a components perspective, the Kindle Fire HD has far more in common with the Nexus than it does the original Fire.

They’re also both Android 4 devices, though the Nexus 7 is running 4.1 and the Kindle Fire 4.0. While the Nexus 7 is pure Android, Amazon has pushed Android’s look and feel so far down I challenge anyone to find it.

Android 4.1, also known as Jelly Bean, is the best Android tablet interface ever, and yet the Kindle Fire HD’s is better. Where Android 4.1’s home screen can seem cluttered with icons, Kindle Fire HD’s home screen can be boiled down to a main menu across the top (with links to, naturally, Shop, Games, Apps, Books, Music, Videos, News Stand, Audiobooks, Web, Photos, Docs and Offers), and the large carousel of icons below that text-only row.

The old Fire has a sort of dark-wood-paneled background (it was supposed to look like a bookshelf — how quaint). The Kindle Fire HD drops the artifice in favor of solid black. Both carousels feature a hodgepodge of games, apps, movies, docs … essentially whatever you touched last. The difference on the new Fire HD is that all the icons look better and the scrolling is, thanks to the new dual-core CPU, stutter-free.

The concept of “Favorites” remains, though you now access them via a star in the lower right-hand corner of the Fire HD’s screen.
Amazon redesigned the keyboard, putting more space between the keys — an improvement — and renaming backspace “Delete.” The latter is an odd choice since “Backspace” means one thing on a traditional keyboard and “Delete” another. They’re not actually interchangeable.
In this new interface, the back to previous activity arrow is always present in a narrow column on the right, which also houses Home and Favorites. Because of the design, the arrow can end up sitting next to the keyboard. I can’t tell you how many times I hit the back to previous activity button when I meant to hit “Delete” (which should be “Backspace”).

Smart Consumption

Amazon has introduced a number of what I’d like to call “intelligent consumption” features. They’re all designed to improve your reading, listening and viewing experience and are only semi-successful.
The best of these is easily X-Ray for Movies which is powered by the Internet Movie Database (or IMDb). When you’re watching certain movies, you can tap on the screen and a little IMDb box will appear with the name of the cast members currently onscreen (the movie does not stop at this point). If you want to learn more about them, just tap their image and a larger window will pop up with IMDb cast member information. The movie freezes in the background until you minimize the larger window.

Though the Kindle Fire HD offers an HDMI-out port for playing movies on your large-screen TV, the X-Ray for Movies interface does not travel with the video content and will be absent on your HDTV.
The HD movie-viewing experience benefits substantially from the new MIMO-based Wi-Fi technology (it uses multiple antennas to improve throughput). I purchased a couple of HD movies (Wrath of the Titans and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) and both not only started playing almost instantly on the Kindle Fire HD 7" , but there was never a moment’s hesitation in the video stream. By contrast, the original Fire video stream took almost a minute to arrive and start playing. In my experience though, the Google Nexus 7 pretty much matched this playback performance.

Other content features like Immersive Reading are, I think, going to be a matter of taste. Immersive reading combines audiobooks with traditional reading. So you can have Samuel L. Jackson narrate “A Rage in Harlem” as you read the e-book. Each word he speaks is highlighted. You can even speed up his narration, which makes the iconic actor sound ridiculous. Overall, I found the feature annoying and would never use it again.

A Better Face

Mail worked fine on the old Kindle Fire, but everything about the interface, and the messages within, was tiny. Amazon has managed to make the Kindle Fire HD a higher-resolution device with email that’s 10 times easier to read. Everything about the interface is better. It was easy to add two accounts and, just as in iOS, I can view all my mail in an aggregate account if I choose.

Gaming is also better on the new Kindle, and not just because of the more powerful hardware. Yes, the screen is bright, brilliant and graphics are crisp and smooth (even when I played Asphalt 7, the device never skipped a beat). However, one of my favorite new innovations is WhisperSync for Games. Like WhisperSync for books, which can automatically sync your place in a book across multiple devices, WhisperSync for games makes sure that if you’re on level 12 of “Where’s My Perry” on one Kindle device, you’ll be on level 12 on all Kindle devices. It’s a wonderful innovation that Apple should adopt for all iOS devices as soon as possible.

As I mentioned earlier, the Kindle Fire HD now has a camera. It worked perfectly with the pre-installed Skype for Kindle Fire app. There is, however, no “Camera” app on the device, which means there’s no way to access the optical device except through Skype. Amazon promised me a new Facebook app that should also access the camera and allow users to capture and upload photos directly to their Facebook accounts.

The absence of a dedicated camera app is especially puzzling because Amazon put so much work into the new Photos menu option. If you add photos to your Amazon cloud account (you get 5GB for free, and unlimited space for all the Amazon content you buy) you can access them on the device, which provides a very attractive mosaic interface and finally supports pinching and zooming for photos. I managed my cloud-based Amazon content, by the way, via a free Windows-based utility that let me drag and drop files (Office Docs, pictures, music files, video, etc.) from my PC to Amazon’s cloud servers and manage folders. All my files were then accessible to me via the Kindle Fire HD’s menu under the Cloud option.

Like other Kindles, this is also a reading device. Magazines look amazing on it and the page-turn animation is quite realistic, but you will probably choose to double-tap the content to get to the easy reading mode. Book content looks as good as ever.

On the social side, the promised Facebook app for Kindle Fire did not arrive in time for my review. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the native Twitter client arrived just in time. It’s clean, clear and worked flawlessly. Better yet, once you add the app to the Kindle Fire HD, Twitter appears as one of the Silk Browser share options.

Looking Good

Let’s talk about the screen for a moment. Amazon spent a lot of time touting all the special technology they added to cut down on glare and make the display readable in direct light (laminating the touch screen and LCD panel into a single pane of glass). Indoors, the new Kindle Fire HD screen is miles better than the old display (colors are definitely truer) and viewing angles are not only better than the old Fire, but slightly better than what you’ll find on the Nexus 7 . Outside, however, I still couldn’t read a book on it. An E Ink display will always be better for that activity.

For as much as I like the Kindle Fire HD, and I do like it, it still felt a bit unfinished. The promised Free Time parental control was absent from my test unit, and I ran into a number of system hiccups, including apps that wouldn’t load, like Fruit Ninja (it got stuck on Feint) and a game based on Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (which worked fine on the original Fire). The Silk browser crashed and I even had a full system crash that forced a reboot. My guess is that all those issues can be fixed with a slip-stream system update.

There are a couple of other nits. The device does not ship with a power plug. Instead, you get a USB cable that you can plug into your computer or another USB charger plug you have lying around (I have a lot of them). If you want Amazon’s charger, it’ll cost you $9.99. Next, there are the offers. Amazon has actually subsidized the price of all this powerful hardware with sleep-screen ads. I do not mind them, but if you do, you can opt out — by paying an additional $15. Me, I’d live with the ads.

These minor speed bumps aside, there is no doubt that the Kindle Fire HD 7" is, at $199, a fantastic value. Yes, I realize that the updated standard-def Kindle Fire (which is somewhat faster than the old one) is now just $159, but that device truly pales in comparison to Amazon’s new hardware. The choice, for now, is really between the Kindle Fire HD and Google’s $199 Nexus 7 . Both are great, easy-to-use tablets that I could easily recommend, but you will get twice the storage on the Kindle Fire HD. It’ll cost you another $50 for the 16GB Nexus 7.

However, for the moment, I recommend you wait a bit. Apple will surely deliver a 7-inch iPad this fall and Barnes & Noble will likely soon roll out a major revision of the Nook Tablet. With those pieces in place you’ll be ready to make your choice. Which do I recommend? Well, it really depends, I think, on whose ecosystem you favor.