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Kindle Fire tries to do a lot, and fails at almost everything
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoThis review is a good example of the strange willingness to ignore the fact that the iPhone and iPad are "convergence devices". The original iPod was held up as a great design because it did one thing and did it well. The iPhone at the time of introduction did 3 things poorly (phone, iPod, browser) but succeeded because it was a good trade-off. You were going to buy a phone anyway, probably an iPod too. If you could pay a small extra fee and get a passable mobile web browser and only have to carry one device then that was a good deal. However the cognitive dissonance remains in the Apple community where compromise is never supposed to be good enough. So the Kindle Fire can be a "fail" because it's not as good an e-reader as e-ink devices. Guess what, neither is the iPad, just like the iPhone is still not a better phone than some disposable handset with a months standby. Nor is the iPad as mobile or as cheap as an e-ink reader but as an overall package it's pretty neat, particularly if you watch a lot of video and surf the web for entertainment and want to play Angry Birds. And so is the kindle Fire, just scoring a bit more highly on mobile and cheap and losing out on some other things. It's just plain weird to worship one set of engineering trade-offs as perfection and ruthlessly attack another set of tradeoffs that, in the big picture, are so similar as to be indistinguishable to most normal people.