Gadgetory

greetings all this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're going to take a closer look at the hardware on the kindle fire from amazon so sit back relax and enjoy the show so let's start out looking at the actual 7 inch displays you can see we got this turned on right now IPS display it's got Gorilla Glass here so we can stand up to a lot of abuse if you turn it just slightly you can see the spot spear that happened on some displays but not on others not terribly important it doesn't detract from the viewing angles or anything like that to say anything like that rubberized a border that goes around the edge here adds a little bit of a grip otherwise I think it's just there to hold the glass I don't know that it has any specific purpose at all brightness on the other hand this is at the lowest brightness right now and if we kick that brightness all the way up to full bright because it gets a lot brighter color levels are good in comparison with like the galaxy s2 and say another you know Android devices this is a little warmer in color than the galaxy s2 like the epic 4g touch but it is the color depth and the contrast isn't as good as say on a super amoled screen it does have another sensor up here which we talked about in the unboxing this turns out to be that this this might be the light sensor and it just is currently disabled in this version of the Amazon tablet android OS whether or not it remains to be seen if they're going to reenable that brightness functionality apparently was buggy so that's why it was left out but to the sensor is still there which is great on the bottom of the device here we can see the power button which lights up as you charge it so it's green when it's charging or rather it's green when it's fully charged or when you power it on it turns on green for a moment orange when it's charging it's got a standard micro USB charging port which is fantastic which means that you don't have to rely on any prior Terry cabling use any micro USB cable you like if you plug it into your computer it still will charge from your computer although it up that'll be a little slower then you would if you Paul you two doing the wall wart that's included headphone jack is as you would expect by some reviews I have scenes talked about the fact that this also produce a lot of clicking and popping I didn't experience any of that and I also didn't have any problems with clicking or popping or humming noises occurring when I wasn't in human unity music or audio was playing that said they also found out that while the kindle fire does not have a microphone port in it if you buy the right combination of microphone / headphone you can actually use the microphone on the headphone unit two broadcasts or record directly into the kindle fire which is a great feature on the top and here we've got the speakers and as you can see they're just a couple of pair of speakers and when you hold on to it vertically as you would or rather in landscape mode as you would with let's say netflix or amazon's video store you're actually holding on to one of these speakers so then the sound becomes quite small and and then really with these sort of speakers you can't expect to have too much else from them other than a small sound they're not going to be a powerhouse they're going to work just fine but they are what you expect on the back of the unit we've got the Kindle logo and as you can see here it's got kind of a rubberized feel that does pick up fingerprints pretty readily but it does allow for you to have a pretty firm grip on the device it's got a 4400 milliamp hour battery according to the folks at the exit site and frankly I found that the battery life has been fantastic with this unit even though though it's a little smaller than let's say the ipad 2 we'll come back to that more in the comparison side of the video tour but really I've been very pleased with the life on the device Wi-Fi only on this device although the chipsets again from the teardown that we've seen online also includes the bluetooth and FM radio so it remains to be seen if somebody can get that enabled in a custom rom or if Amazon is going to include that in the future eight gigabytes of flash memory all of that is available to the user to in-store things from or i should say all that a small amount that will save the OS and swap space and that sort of thing unlike the nook color which is only designed to allow for a small amount of user set aside space so you can load this up with as many videos as you like of your own devising as well as streaming video content through amazon service or through netflix etc 512 megs ram that does make the device a little bit sluggish at times but frankly i've found that for this type of device it's perfectly serviceable very snappy some reviews have mentioned that touching the items on the screen causing the launch very slowly I haven't found that to be the case I've found it to be more often not it's when I'm tapping the screen I miss tap on you can see my daughter has been watching miss tap on the actual large icons specifically with this the carousel view here is where that has a tendency to happen but you can see here I'm able to flip through this very quickly without any problems and if I go into the apps here my app tray i can scroll up and down and there's very little hesitation or lag you can see a little bit there as I'm going up and down I think that has more to do with the android OS than the actual processor and ram because of these items down here with the arrows on them will cover more of those in the software review but that's how you get access to some of your other previously purchased amazon apps that aren't downloaded to the device it's got a dual core 1 gigahertz texas instruments omap 4430 processor again is very snappy and i have found it to be very comparable to other devices that I've got it's not the fastest up you know android tablet it's out there but for what i'm doing with it namely reading books and occasionally watching video reading comics it's really really snappy thickness of the device has not been really too much of a problem it is larger than say the ipad 2 thickness wise but it feels really good in the hands reading a book with this form factor has been really nice and convenient feels very comfortable and frankly I find myself using this quite a bit around the house to read content specific comic books or say I amazon books that sort of thing some website browsing although you have to do a lot of pinch to zoom more than you would on a larger tablet device that wraps up our closer look at the hardware on the amazon kindle fire if you have any comments or questions would like to see something specifically covered in the software tour coming up soon then leave a comment below and we'll try to cover those items for you please leave us a thumbs up if you liked the video you can visit us at pocketnow.com thanks for watching you