Gadgetory

well hey this is Josh with the Virg and we're taking a look at the new Kindle Fire HD the 7-inch version looking at the design of this obviously the Fire HD 7 has a 7 inch display it's a 1280 by 800 screen it's one of the nicest screens I've seen maybe the nicest next to the new iPad display it's got pretty decent pixel density and the colors are just really vibrant the blacks are really deep and Amazon went on about the reflectiveness here about how they've sort of treated this to be anti glare but it still feels fairly fairly heavy on glare to me so it's not like a big improvement in that department it's got a camera right here underneath the bezel for Skype conversations which is an app that works quite well on here actually the bezel is a little bit bigger clearly they want to give you some purchase for your for your thumbs and it's gotten you know generally a nice design it feels very much like an iPad or a touchpad and it's got like the rounded corners and you go around back soft touch material on the back there's a thin strip of plastic right here which houses dual driver speakers the website describes these as room filling sound but the website is high-end drunk because they just sound like kind of tinny laptop speakers but they do sound loud and they are in stereo and they don't distort so when you're holding this device in landscape like this you actually do get a pretty good stereo field but it's not like stereo that you might get out of an actual stereo one other thing worth really pointing out on the hardware is the placement of the power button the power sleep button and the volume rockers the power button is sometimes nearly impossible to locate when you're using the device it's completely embedded in the side of the device and you can barely feel where it's located which makes it kind of a pain in the ass to use and the volume rocker suffers from the same problem inside it's got a 1.2 gigahertz dual-core TI OMAP CPU it's got power VR graphics a gig of ram this version has 16 gigs of storage that make a 32 gig as well it has bluetooth no gps chip no NFC if you're worried about that sort of it's relatively bare-bones it doesn't have a light sensor and accelerometer and a gyroscope in general performance was really good game performance was I would say excellent I was playing dead space on it which is one of my tablet go twos and I thought performance was very good as has been pretty well documented this is running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich but Amazon has stripped away pretty much all of the defining features of that version of Android it's really in some ways works to its advantage because it streamlines a lot of stuff and I think in other ways it creates confusion about how to navigate and consistency issues in terms of the navigation of the device additionally Amazon software the layer they've added to Android is not that smooth and can be kind of sluggish and laggy and a little bit buggy so the experience is simplified but in that simplified experience it's not always perfect for instance in places like the keyboard I think that whatever Amazon is doing has been a detriment to the functionality of the keyboard not an improvement it feels sluggish presses on it seem to take longer and it's just not a comfortable typing experience here you can see the lockscreen which currently has ads on it or in fact there are ads all over the device there's a way you can opt out apparently for $15 I have clearly not opted out as you can see you're treated to a variety of different advertisements when you lock and unlock the device so this is the basic home screen I get the feeling that that Amazon kind of wants you to hold it in landscape instead of portrait though there's certainly a lot of stuff you do on this importer for instance book reading here's portrait mode now something interesting about portrait mode you'll notice that down here in the corner is an ad and as you scroll through your content this could be your apps or books or anything else you have on the device it'll suggest other things that customers have bought and that it wants you to buy down below here now when you opt out this little ad goes away and the lockscreen ads go away but these days so it's kind of constantly recommending things for you to buy which some people may not feel super psyched about this is a comic I was reading this is of course purchased through Amazon and you can see that there's navigation that appears and dissapears which I actually find a little annoying because it makes getting around that much more difficult they put the home button on the left side here the back button in the middle which doesn't make any sense to me and they've got this little favorites button which can you can arrange with your own apps it's not exactly multitasking but it can kind of stand in for multitasking but it doesn't show you what you've recently used recently used apps are shown here on the home screen it can be apps it can be music you've listened to it can be webpage as you visited books you've read movies you've been watching so one of the really notable pieces of the puzzle here is Amazon's ecosystem it is just fantastic it is really one of the only ecosystems maybe the only at this point that can take on what Apple is doing and it actually goes beyond what Apple offers and in some way bests it particularly with the prime offerings you get a bundle of great content that you don't have to pay for you've got a flat fee you pay your subscription price once a year and you get access to tremendous stuff and that's something that not even Apple or Microsoft can offer at this point so it is a really compelling reason to take a look at this device especially if you feel like that's going to be the focus of your use one of the nice things that Amazon is doing is whisper sync which they're now kind of bringing to every service that they offer for movies what it means is that you're able to start watching something on the device or elsewhere and then pick it up when you pick up your tablet or when you move to your living room and it's a pretty cool I have to say it's it's pretty cool and it shows how big their ecosystem really is because you can do this on roku on your xbox on other devices like smartphones so it really is kind of a system spanning ecosystem that they're showing off and and it works nicely it works well you know they've been doing the same thing for books where you can sync your books across devices they brought it to movies the other things they've brought is x-ray right now it's basically just cast list from IMDB they're also doing this in books it shows you character mentions and you click on the characters you get a bio about that character and some other information so right now x-ray isn't that useful but I think it's it's foreseeable that in the future Amazon will expand what x-ray actually does whether it's related content or even perhaps being able to purchase things that you see in a movie or items that are mentioned in a book the idea of dissecting what the content is and what's inside of it seems pretty powerful but right now it's it's I'd say a little bit of a sideshow one thing that's interesting about the AppStore is that there are a lot of games here not very much productivity software the stuff that is available I wouldn't say is necessarily the cream of the crop you know I think Amazon wants to push the App Store really hard but in comparison to what it's offered for something like the Nexus 7 it's a much smaller selection and I would say that the quality of the selection is is not nearly as good so in all the fire is actually a really excellent tablet for 200 bucks and it's mostly excellent because of the Amazon connections the offerings in terms of content are fantastic I mean they really show the breadth and depth of Amazon's ecosystem and they are really valuable as far as I'm concerned the problem is as a tablet that does anything other than consume Amazon's content or can be used to shop for Amazon stuff it sort of falls flat the the app selection isn't as good as something like the Nexus 7 the user interface in my opinion isn't as good as something like the Nexus 7 or the iPad which is of course in a different price class but this is a question about whether you want a device that is for lean back casual experiences or a device that can do more than just those casual experiences so if you're a user that's looking for a more full-featured experience a more full tablet experience something like what the iPad can provide you know I would say you want to look at the Nexus 7 there's just a lot more you can do with it it just seems a lot more capable to me if however you just want something to take with you on trips to watch content to read books to check out magazines there is really no better choice in the price range for 199 bucks you get a pretty incredible package and when it's coupled with Prime it really is an excellent choice or the casual tablet user