Now that I already posted things that I like about the Kindle Fire, let me mention a few things that I don’t like about the Kindle Fire:
Touch Sensitivity –Sometimes it just doesn’t respond as I’d like. I might be trying to highlight a passage and it turns to the next page instead. Other times I need to swipe it or tap it several times to get it to do what I want. The response on the iPod Touch is much better.
Periodic Lockups – This seems to happen frequently when you are in an application and you need to force the app to close and start again. Again, mildly annoying. The other thing that I’ve encountered twice is a complete lock-up where the Kindle becomes completely unresponsive. First the Wi-Fi connection fails to respond, flipping it off immediately if you try to turn it back on, and then shortly thereafter, you simply have a blank, black screen that won’t turn off (if you can even tell that it is still on). Putting it on the charger doesn’t change this. The only thing that will is a manual reboot where you press and hold down the power button for over 30 seconds. This causes it to reboot completely and everything is fine after this.
My first Kindle Fire was returned to the store the first time this occurred (about 2 weeks after I bought it) and they thought that it was defective and swapped it out for a new one. The hard reboot solution might not have been widely known that early after release, so it is possible that the Kindle was fine.
Converting Documents from PDF Files is Messy – Some PDFs do not convert to a Kindle format at all, and many of them don’t convert well at all. I know that it is unrealistic to expect all PDFs to convert smoothly to a Kindle format, but sometimes the results are just awful; Lines broken in mid-sentence, random numbers all over the place, and hyperlinks that don’t work. I don’t know if anything can be done about this, other than authors and publishers creating a Kindle friendly option to go along with a PDF. You can use a PDF reader application, but then you lose the ability to highlight text, which is one best features of the Kindle.
Free Books – I know, right? Cry me a river. Too many free books… Boo Hoo. But, when you have over 500 of them loaded on your Kindle, it gets hard to find a specific book you downloaded. True, you can sort it by recently downloaded (or accessed) and by the author’s last name, but this sometimes isn’t enough. What I’d love to have is the ability to organize books by subject or genre… Heck, even the Dewey Decimal system would be great. I can see my Kindle becoming a mobile reference library.
These being noted, as I’ve stated in my earlier post: I love my Kindle Fire. It is a great product. Especially for being a first generation product, and I’m sure that they will only get better from here.
