
Kindle Fire tries to do a lot, and fails at almost everything - llambda
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/11/15/111511-tech-gearreview-kindlefire-1-2/
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ZeroGravitas
This 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.

