Hot! Kindle Fire Review

Amazon isn't just a bookstore. Nor is it a music store, shoe store, video streaming service, or newsstand. Amazon has wrapped all of these things together into a rich, easy way to suck down almost every conceivable form of media with one key: Prime . But Prime has been stuck behind the tangled butterface of Amazon.com the site is a mess, a cage. This Kindle is meant to change all that, to not only be a Better Kindle, but a direct conduit to all of Prime's awesomeness: the missing piece.

And what a piece it is, right? It's hard to believe it sprung from the same hatchery as the Kindles of yore, with its dual-core processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a gorgeous 7-inch, 16-million color display beaming a custom Amazonian Android build, made specifically for Kindle's essence.

If the Fire succeeds, everything changes for Amazon. And for Apple as well.

Using it

The Fire doesn't feel like any other Android tablet and that's a very, very good thing. From the minute you turn it on, the device is puzzlingly simple. Where's the home screen?, someone might ask you. All you see is a shelf, stacked with whatever you've looked at recently: novels, magazines, apps, TV episodes everything. The emphasis is squarely on picking out stuff to stimulate your eyeballs (and ears) with all else is secondary. This makes for a UI that's not only simple, but intuitive. You don't have to think about how to use the Fire, because unlike Apple's dodgy attempts at interface metaphors , Amazon's works perfectly: here's my shelf of things. Which thing will I choose?

Of course, there's more than the shelf. A search bar at up top does the obvious across everything you own, and small organizational tabs inconspicuously span the upper boundary of the screen: newspapers and magazines, books, music, video, docs, apps, and a web browser. Need more to consume? The Store is always at most two clicks away. Tap Books. Tap Store. Here's the entirety of Amazon's catalog, neatly organized, easily downloaded.

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