Kindle Fire

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:27:57 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

I received a new Kindle Fire on Saturday last. It's for my work, test hardware for our Android apps. Being the team member with the most Java experience, I get to maintain, fix bugs, and possibly develop for Android. I also ordered a used Samsung Galaxy S (NOT the new S II), for testing on a smaller screen. Expect that in a couple of days.

My Kindle Fire works well, but it's too heavy and pixelated to replace my iPhone for lying-in-bed book reading and video viewing. Would be OK for reading books on the couch, but I rarely do that. Would also be OK for watching video on the couch. I may do that occasionally, though it won't show my web-only Hulu content, so I still need to sit at my desk for that. Nice-looking screen. Reasonably responsive, though it has this bad habit of becoming unresponsive for 2-3 seconds now and then.

We use Cocos2d for iPhone on iOS devices and cocos2d-android-1 on Android. I got the Cocos2d demo to load and run on the Kindle Fire.

I make more mistakes on its keyboard than I do in my iPhone, which is wierd, since the buttons are quite a bit bigger. A coworker suggests two-thumb instead of one-finger typing. I'll try that. Will probably increase my hit-rate on the keys on the left side of the keyboard.

One big downside to the Kindle Fire is that they don't support the Android Market, only their own Amazon AppStore. The AppStore has lots of content, but the Android Market has much more. I've read that you have to root it to get Market to work. I'm going to try it without rooting. I need it unrooted for my testing, to ensure that I'm testing what the majority of our users will be using.

Unboxing photos below.

Kindle Fire Box
The shipping container

Kindle Fire Box Open
Box opened

Kindle Fire unboxed
Unboxed and running

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