The Amazon Kindle Fire is spreading (selling) like wild fire. Having already unseated the iPad at Best Buy as the highest selling tablet, Amazon are on course to selling a full 3.6 million devices by the end of the year. But the tablet has had its fair share of criticism and this mostly because of performance issues. Many buyers have been lodging complaints with Amazon with issues ranging from browser performance to touch interface issues where everything seems too small for a touch screen, in as much as the tablet is fairly larger than most touch screen phones.
In a bid to ward off these issues, Amazon has promised an over-the-air update to the Amazon Kindle Fire, which they promise will sort out most of the issues that the tablet has been experiencing so far. Nevertheless, I think what has really got the Amazon Kindle Fire is the high expectations that everyone had for it.
For a long time now everyone has been looking to Apple to create that next glossy and glitzy tablet that would wow everyone’s socks off. But Apple are also notorious for overpricing their products and this has left many potential buyers disappointed and disgruntled at the unreachability of the Apple tablets. But with the anticipated release of an affordable tablet that could in some ways feed that desire for a top performing tablet, many people perhaps thought they would be getting an iPad for $199, which is in fact not the case.
Amazon are good and even great at a number of things but making devices is not one of them, not yet. When you consider that Apple, Samsung and other device makers have been at it for decades, it’s maybe to high a hope to expect Amazon to nail it in the first few years of their début. This is probably why many people have had disappointing experiences with the Amazon Kindle Fire while in actuality, what is really disappointing is the fact that the Amazon Kindle Fire is not a discounted iPad.
Amazon are however great at learning from their mistakes and compensating for their shortfalls and that’s why the rumour mills are already turning with whispers about a new Kindle Fire in the works with a possible release date for spring. Either way, I think Amazon have outdone themselves and have filled in the huge gap created but left under served by Apple when they created the iPad.
