Why I was wrong, and can wholeheartedly recommend the Kindle Fire

A few years ago, I got an original Kindle Fire for Christmas. I loved it out of the box and for years after that. But at some point I fell out of love with it, and wrote an article here that I think I need to address.

Back in 2012 when I wrote that article, I think I fundamentally misunderstood what the Kindle Fire is. I thought it was a tablet. And I tried to use it like a tablet. I just fired it up tonight, and the wreckage of my attempts to use it as a tablet were still evident. I just uninstalled a Zappos app, for fuck’s sake. What on earth was I thinking?

I made the argument back then that because Amazon wasn’t going to push feature updates to the device, it wasn’t worth buying. And that’s not fair, or even what should happen. My first-gen Kindle Fire still works exactly the same as it did when I took it out of the box. No better, but no worse either. I can’t say the same for my Nexus 7. It recently got the update to Lollipop, and it’s become completely unusable. That hardware should never have gotten that software update. It just can’t handle it. My Fire doesn’t have that problem.

But fundamentally, I thought that the device I had that looked and felt like a tablet was a tablet. It’s not. It’s a Kindle. A very good kindle, in fact. One that a person can stream videos on, even from Amazon’s prime library, a feat that can’t be replicated on any other tablet. Sure, you can do limited web browsing, and you can install apps from the Amazon app store, but that’s not what the device is for. It’s for reading, and it does a very good job of that. I’ll give you that in bright sunlight, like at the beach, a PaperWhite Kindle wins out. But I took my Fire to the beach in Mexico, and I could read it just fine.

Everything about the device reinforces that it’s a Kindle, not a tablet. The interface throws up the media you’re using front and center. The battery life is excellent; it’s far better than my Nexus 7. The new ones even have stereo sound. And the kicker of all of it? The new, basic, non-HD Kindle Fire is $49.99. I almost didn’t believe it when I saw it. I had to buy one for my wife, if only so I could see one myself, and see what fifty bucks gets you. It turns out, it gets you a whole lot. It’s just enough of a tablet to run a Pinterest app, but really it’s a Kindle. And that’s exactly what I wanted.