NEW YORK — The Kindle was always an odd name.
Amazon used a verb to name a thing, raising the question: Kindle what? Now we have the answer: Kindle Fire.
The Kindle Fire is the first full-color, touch-screen Kindle. It’s available for $199.
A price like that for what’s essentially a small iPad is bound to light the flames of desire this holiday season. I want to cool those down a bit, or some of you will buy it and feel burned.
The Fire is the best Kindle yet, no doubt about it.
It’s more of an all-purpose computer than an e-reader. It shows movies, TV shows and Web pages. It does e-mail and lets you play games. You’ll be lucky to get any reading done, with so many other things to do.
But it has to be weighed against the competition. When you do that, it becomes apparent just how spare Amazon had to keep the device to limbo under that $200 price level.
The Kindle’s design is even starker than the iPad’s. It’s a black monolith with only one button, the power switch, and jacks for headphones and power. Controls are on the screen.
The screen measures 7 inches diagonally, larger than the monochrome Kindles and less than half the size of the iPad’s.
The size of the screen wasn’t much of an issue on the monochrome Kindles because they were mainly good for showing text anyway. But the responsive color screen of the Fire opens up a lot of possibilities, such as showing magazine and comic-book pages.
Here, the small size of the screen gets in the way. It’s just too far from standard page sizes to do them justice. Magazine pages look tiny. Amazon has to jump through some hoops to make them readable, like including a mode that shows just the text.
But flicking through a magazine is still a lot of work — and it should not be like work.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, launched last year, has the same problem — a nice color screen that’s too small. The iPad gets it right, for a few hundred dollars more.
While we’re on the subject of “too small,” let’s talk about the Fire’s memory — 8 gigabytes. That’s enough for more books than you’ll ever read, but 10 movies eat up the whole thing.
The cheapest iPad, at $499, has twice as much memory.
Amazon says the Fire doesn’t need more memory because the company provides an online storage locker, where you can stuff all your music and other content. That works when you have Wi-Fi coverage but not otherwise.
The Fire also lacks a camera and a microphone — standard features on tablets. Their absence is forgivable at $199.
So the Fire does justice to fiction and films, but the iPad does better in almost every way.
If the step up to $499 is too much, you might want to consider the Nook Tablet. At $249, it is the same size as the Fire but with twice the memory. It won’t access all of Amazon’s goodies and apps, but it will have Netflix and Hulu.
