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I think Marco was trying, unsuccessfully, to be to the Kindle Fire what Siracusa was to the Jobs bio. He even got a nudge from Gruber, who called his review "sc

by LVB 15y ago

I think Marco was trying, unsuccessfully, to be to the Kindle Fire what Siracusa was to the Jobs bio. He even got a nudge from Gruber, who called his review "scathing". "Bitching" might have been more apt. I can imagine him grimacing as he bared to open the UPS box.

jodrellblank 15y ago
Why do all the comments here say Marco is biased because it isn't an iPad? How does that make a computer which doesn't respond to touch reliably acceptable? I played fast, responsive games in cga on a 4mhz XT, Doom was pushing responsive colour 3D on 386 and 486s, and now we have devices showing a static image with clickable points which don't click, and switching badly between two not animated images, and this behaviour is fine because only the industry leader can be expected to get this right, everything else gets an exception. Windows Mobile was clunky but usable in 2000, its not acceptable for devices built for human input to ignore human input, for devices built to show an interface to people to do it badly. Loading animations are fine, being slow when doing work is fine, being slow when running a badly written 3rd party app is at least understandable. But the likes of Amazon and Google pushing flagship products that perform worse animations than small games companies were doing 15 years ago on worse hardware, is totally pathetic. And writing that criticism off as "Apple fanboy behaviour" is building a heck of an RDF field of some sort.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  While I think of it, I'm a big Apple Fanboy and have a BlackBerry 9900 which annoys me every time I use it, but one of the things I can't fault it on is responsiveness. Browser scrolling, app switching, main menu switching, all fast, there's no keyboard lag, no email inbox scrolling lag - that part of the otherwise-annoying-UI is all great.
- LVB 15y ago
  I'm not criticizing the review because of the author's Apple bias. I just don't think it's a quality review. He made no attempt to broaden his perspective widely and consider many types of potential users of the device, and then assess it against those different use cases. Instead it was basically: "It's complete crap and here's 30 things I don't like. The End." I can imagine perhaps some real piece of $79 Walmart faux-tablet junk getting such treatment, but the Fire isn't that. It does have a lot of flaws, but it has a lot of good points too, which he made no attempt to discuss. A much more useful review came from fellow Apple devotee Andy Ihnatko (http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/8816567-452/review-kindle-fire-is-no-ipad-killer-but-it-is-a-killer-device.html http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/8816567-452/revie...)

by LVB 15y ago

jodrellblank 15y ago

Why do all the comments here say Marco is biased because it isn't an iPad? How does that make a computer which doesn't respond to touch reliably acceptable? I played fast, responsive games in cga on a 4mhz XT, Doom was pushing responsive colour 3D on 386 and 486s, and now we have devices showing a static image with clickable points which don't click, and switching badly between two not animated images, and this behaviour is fine because only the industry leader can be expected to get this right, everything else gets an exception. Windows Mobile was clunky but usable in 2000, its not acceptable for devices built for human input to ignore human input, for devices built to show an interface to people to do it badly. Loading animations are fine, being slow when doing work is fine, being slow when running a badly written 3rd party app is at least understandable. But the likes of Amazon and Google pushing flagship products that perform worse animations than small games companies were doing 15 years ago on worse hardware, is totally pathetic. And writing that criticism off as "Apple fanboy behaviour" is building a heck of an RDF field of some sort.

jodrellblank 15y ago
While I think of it, I'm a big Apple Fanboy and have a BlackBerry 9900 which annoys me every time I use it, but one of the things I can't fault it on is responsiveness. Browser scrolling, app switching, main menu switching, all fast, there's no keyboard lag, no email inbox scrolling lag - that part of the otherwise-annoying-UI is all great.
LVB 15y ago
I'm not criticizing the review because of the author's Apple bias. I just don't think it's a quality review. He made no attempt to broaden his perspective widely and consider many types of potential users of the device, and then assess it against those different use cases. Instead it was basically: "It's complete crap and here's 30 things I don't like. The End." I can imagine perhaps some real piece of $79 Walmart faux-tablet junk getting such treatment, but the Fire isn't that. It does have a lot of flaws, but it has a lot of good points too, which he made no attempt to discuss. A much more useful review came from fellow Apple devotee Andy Ihnatko (http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/8816567-452/review-kindle-fire-is-no-ipad-killer-but-it-is-a-killer-device.html http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/8816567-452/revie...)