Holiday Gift Guide— Kindle Fire

If you’re curious about mobile tablets, but aren’t quite ready to spend $500 on an iPad, you might want to consider the Kindle Fire. Like Amazon’s Kindle, the Kindle Fire is an e-reader, so you can use it to read books, magazines, and more. However, unlike older versions of the Kindle, Kindle Fire is also a full-color touchscreen tablet.

Kindle Fire

Why consider the Kindle Fire?

The Kindle Fire is a solid introductory tablet. It has the features that people like about tablets in general: it’s compact, lightweight, and fairly easy to use. While the Kindle Fire isn’t powerful enough to be a true replacement for a computer, there’s plenty you can do with it, including:

• Download games and applications
• Browse the web wirelessly
• Download and read e-books and magazines
• Stream movies and music

Of course, you could do all of these things on any tablet. The feature that really makes the Kindle Fire stand out is its price. At $199, it’s a good deal. Of course, $199 isn’t pocket change, but for a tablet, it’s incredibly cheap. Other tablets have come out at around the same price range, but none have been as powerful or reliable as the Kindle Fire.

Drawbacks

Inevitably, any new tablet will be compared to iPad, which is currently the most-used tablet worldwide. Unfortunately, the Kindle Fire doesn’t do very well in this comparison. It’s less powerful than the iPad, which makes it slower. When we tested it here at our office, there was noticeable lag time when we flipped the pages of an eBook or tried to zoom while viewing certain web pages. This wasn’t a huge problem, but it was a little frustrating. (It’s worth noting that all of us here at GCFLearnFree.org have used the iPad before. The people I’ve talked to who haven’t used an iPad didn’t find the Kindle Fire’s slower speed as distracting as we did.)

The Kindle Fire also has fewer features than the iPad. It lacks a microphone and camera, so you won’t be able to use it for Skype or any other type of video chat. It also lacks 3G capability, which means that you can only connect to the web by accessing a wireless network. Finally, it currently supports far fewer applications than the iPad does. This should change as the Kindle Fire becomes more popular, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you’re looking for a tablet that can do a variety of tasks.

Is it worth it?

If you’ve never used a tablet before and are looking to get started, the Kindle Fire is a solid choice. It’s easy to use, fairly reliable, and starting at $199, it’s less than half the price of the cheapest iPad. However, you get what you pay for: if you want a truly powerful tablet, or have used the iPad in the past, the Kindle Fire might not suit your needs.  In short, the Kindle Fire is worth buying if you’re looking for a basic tablet for streaming video, reading books, and surfing the web— just don’t buy it as an iPad replacement.

You can buy the Kindle Fire online at Amazon.com.