Kindle Fire Review, part 2

In my last post I reviewed Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet as a media consumption device, the use for which it was intended. When the Kindle Fire was first announced, however, I wasn't excited about it because I wanted to consume a lot of media. I was excited because--at $199--I felt the Fire could be an inexpensive alternative to other tablets (i.e. the Apple iPad) in an educational setting. When I read online stories about the Kindle Fire announcement, I conjured images of every teacher and ever student in my school district carrying a Kindle Fire device with them from home to school and back again. I imagined that for students it would make a terrific 1 to 1 solution, and I could see teachers and administrators using it for administrative purposes.

In my next review I'll look at the Kindle as a potential 1 to 1 solution, but today I'd like to look review it as a potential productivity tool for educators.

Review 2: The Kindle as a Productivity Tool for Educators
In my last review, I ended by giving the Kindle a "grade" as a personal media device. What I didn't do, though, was what every educator ought to do when evaluating something, and that is lay out in advance what it is that I'm expecting. We educators like to call those expectations a "rubric." So before I begin this review of the Fire as a productivity tool, I think it only fair to lay out those expectations in advance.

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Rubric for Scoring Tablets as a Productivity Tool

For my needs, a tablet for work should have

1. An email client that will work with a Microsoft Exchange Server
2. Some sort of office productivity program, with a word processing program, a spreadsheet  program, and a presentation program. It needs to be compatible with Microsoft Office, and needs to allow me to edit the files as well as read them.
3. A .pdf reader
4. A web browser that is robust enough to allow me to utilize the web applications necessary for my work.
5. An app store with the programs I need

A: 5 out of the 5 items above

B: 4 out of the 5 items above

C: 3 out of the 5 items above, and a partial on one of the others

D: 3 out of the 5 items above

F: Fewer than 3 of the 5 items above

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Other users might want a microphone and camera so that they can Skype, or a spot for a SIM card so that they can get a monthly data plan and have online access anywhere, but I don't really need those items to be productive. We have wireless access in every building in our district, and on the rare occasion when I'm at work and outside of the district network I can use my cell phone to stay in touch. So the above are my needs.

And out of the box, the Kindle Fire doesn't do so great...

1. Email Client
There is a native email client on the Fire when it comes out of the box, but that client can't connect to Microsoft Exchange environments. There are several apps in the app store, though, that CAN. The problem, though, is that none of them are free. After trying several of them, I've settled on a program called TouchDown. It integrates seamlessly with Exchange. I'm especially impressed by the calendar function of the program, which is so detailed that it even keeps the category colors that I put into my Outlook client. In fact, the TouchDown program looks more like Outlook than the real Outlook program I've seen on Windows phones. Cost of the program: $9.99 in the Amazon app store.  OUT OF THE BOX: Fail!  WITH SOME WORK: Check!

2. Office Productivity Program 
Installed out of the box on the Fire is a program called Quickoffice, a productivity suite that can open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. But the program is View Only--it can't edit the files. In order to be able to edit and create new files, I had to download the program Documents to Go from the Amazon app store. Documents to Go is normally $14.99, but every day Amazon makes one paid app free, and I checked the app store the day that Documents to Go was free, and grabbed the license key at no cost. Not everyone, though, is going to be so lucky. OUT OF THE BOX: Partial check (read only). WITH SOME WORK: Check!


3. PDF Reader
The QuickOffice program can read PDF's, so OUT OF THE BOX: Check!

4. Robust Web Browser
The Silk web browser works fine for me. I can access my work's Help Desk software (It's actually lightning quick for that), as well as several instructional applications I need to access. Our school district's Student Information System has limited success. Parts work and other parts don't. But I think that's a reflection of the SIS more than of the Kindle Fire, and no other Android tablet I've ever seen works flawlessly with it either. For that reason, I'm willing to say that OUT OF THE BOX: Check!

5. An App Store with the Programs I Need
I actually don't mind that Amazon has its own app store separate from the Google Android market. I've been in the Google Android market, and it makes me feel like walking into that bar that Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi walked into in the original STAR WARS movie. There are some really questionable apps in there, and I like knowing that the Amazon apps have all been checked before they were allowed to be put in there.

That said, though, I really needed only one application, and that was an app for my school district's walk through program. That app is free in the Android marketplace, but it's not in the Amazon marketplace. And considering the limited interest that would be in such an application, I can't imagine that it ever will be in the Amazon app store. There are also no apps related to any Google products, which seems an intentional snipe on the part of Amazon. So in this case, I'd have to say that the results are OUT OF THE BOX: Fail! WITH SOME WORK: Still Fail!

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Overall Grade


OUT OF THE BOX: The Kindle Fire is NOT a good solution for an office productivity tool. Out of the box it only meets my needs in two of the five categories (and SORT OF meets my needs in one other). With that in mind, out of the box the grade has to be...
Grade: F


WITH SOME WORK: After downloading a couple of apps, though, the Kindle Fire serves me a little better. I have my work email, an Office suite, a good web browser, and a PDF reader. The only thing missing is an app store with ALL of the apps I need. But I find that to be a minor annoyance more than a deal killer. I'd be willing to recommend the Kindle Fire as a potential productivity tablet for teachers and administrators, as long as they realize that in addition to the $199 price tag they may need to shell out an additional $25 for the apps they need to get up and running. That would bring the Kindle Fire's total price tag up to $224. That's still only 45% of the price of even the cheapest iPad!
Grade: B

Kindle Fire Review, Part 1

Amazon's new Kindle Fire sort-of-tablet is expected to be one of the hottest holiday gifts this season, and I've been promising for a couple of posts now to give a review. I guess my review is kind of superfluous. A quick Google search of "Kindle Fire review" reveals hundreds of reviews already all over the Internet. I've read a number of them, and they're pretty good. Some have pictures and even video. I highly recommend them. I don't see how my review is going to match some of those really good reviews. Maybe I should just quit now.

Except...

I want to put a little bit of a slant on my review. After all, the reason I was very excited about the Kindle Fire when I first learned about it was not because I particularly wanted one for myself (though I did). I was much more intrigued by what a sub-$200 tablet could mean for education. After all, for years I've heard experts say that 1:1 computing initiatives (where every student in a school has a computing device that they carry around with them) becomes a real possibility once the cost for the device gets below $200. Have we finally arrived?

So I'm going to give three very brief reviews of the device. First, I'll review it as a personal media consumption device (which is how Amazon intends it to be used). Second, I'll review it as a possible administrative tool in an educational setting (Could it be a low cost replacement to an iPad for administrators?). Finally, I'll review it as a possible 1:1 instructional device.

Review 1: The Kindle as a Media Consumption Device
Let's get this straight: It's not Amazon that has been referring to the Kindle Fire as a potential iPad killer, or at the very least as the first serious threat to the iPad in the tablet market. That's been all the doing of journalists. Amazon has been saying since the beginning that the Kindle Fire was about media consumption, about driving people to Amazon's content.

And at that, the device gets high marks. As an almost-tablet for watching movies, listening to music, or reading books, the device is great. It's easy to set up, it's mostly bug free, and since I purchased mine from the Amazon website, it came to my house preconfigured with my settings in it, so it was ready to go almost as soon as I got it out of the box (I did have to put in my Wi-fi settings, but that's true for any wireless device). If I'd purchased the device at Best Buy or some other place other than Amazon, I would have had to link it to my Amazon account, but that takes no more effort than typing in the email address associated with your Amazon account and your Amazon password (I know because I deregistered the device as soon as I connected to the Wi-Fi so that I could see what registration was like).

Once setup was complete, all of my previous Amazon digital content (about 80 MP3's, all five seasons of DEXTER, and a couple of books) was available on my Fire to browse in Cloud mode or download for offline consuming. It was a breeze. And since I'd already signed in with an Amazon account, there was no need to register for the Amazon app store. I was ready to go.

I'm very happy with my Kindle as a personal device. Some people have complained that it's too small, as it's only about half the size of an iPad, but I actually LOVE its small size. Any smaller and I'd have trouble reading the text, and any larger (as in the size of an iPad) and I think I'd find it cumbersome to carry around. This Fire is right about the size of a cheap paperback book. It would easily fit in a purse (not that I have one). Heck, it would probably fit in some of my pockets. Others might prefer a bigger screen, but I am very happy with this.

Other people have complained that the screen responsiveness isn't as exact as an iPad. I wouldnt' know. I haven't spent a lot of time with an iPad. I can say it's on par with the screen of pretty much every other Android device I've ever played with. It works fine for me. Others have said that the Kindle Reader app, the thing that Fire ought to excel in, is a little buggy. I'd say I have seen that. There have been a couple of times when I've had to touch the side of the page more than once or twice to get the page to "turn," but it hasn't been a huge deal to me.

Others have complained that the Silk browser is buggy and slow. A couple of blog posts ago I wrote about how, indeed, the browser is slower when Amazon's "Accelerator" caching is turned on. I've since turned my caching off, and I'd say the browser is fast enough for me. I'm not bothered by the little bit of a wait, and I haven't found a web page yet that didn't display correctly.

I will say this, though: I am more bothered than I thought I would be by the lack of a microphone and a camera. When I first read that they weren't included, I thought, "No big deal. I don't plan to Skype with this thing, and I have plenty of other devices that can take digital pictures." But I wasn't thinking big enough. I went into the Amazon app store a couple of days ago looking for a bar code reading program, and there wasn't a one to be found. I had to think about that for a moment before realizing that without a camera the app would be useless. I did the same thing the next day looking to see if Shazaam was in the app store. Shazaam is pretty useless without a microphone, so what's the point? I'm assuming that I'll continue to find apps that aren't going to do what I want because there's no microphone or camera. Or GPS for that matter (The Fire is the perfect size to function as a GPS navigator).

I understand why Amazon left those items out, and they were right to do so. Adding all of them would probably have increased the price of the Fire by a good $100 or $150, and that would have impacted my decision to purchase it. At $199, I purchased the Fire immediately, almost as an impulse purchase. If it had been priced at $349, though, I would have been much less impulsive about the purchase, and I would have started to question why I shouldn't just go ahead and fork over another $150 and get a low end iPad. So Amazon had to drop some things to get to that affordable price point, but I'm finding the missing items are bothering more than I expected.

All that said, I don't regret the purchase. I love the Fire, and I love even more what it and devices like it could mean for the field of education. I'll write about that, though, in a later blog post. For now, I'll close out this post with an overall verdict on the Fire as a personal device. And as I'm an educator, I'll use a report card analogy...

Grade: B
Teacher's Comments: Love the price, the ease of setup, and the size. Hate that there's no camera, microphone, or GPS, but considering the price and what you DO get, this device is worth considering, especially if all you're planning to do with a tablet is browse the Internet, check Facebook, and watch a movie.

The Kindle Fire's Silk Browser

A couple of posts ago I promised a review of the Kindle Fire coming soon, and I still plan to write that review. In fact, I plan to basically write THREE reviews: 1) The Kindle Fire as a personal media consumption device (for which it was intended), 2) The Kindle Fire as a productivity tool for educators (taking the place of--say--a Smart phone or an iPad, and 3) The Kindle Fire as an instructional tool for use with students. Before I do that, though, I want to write about one part of the Kindle Fire that I am truly disappointed about, and that's the Amazon Silk browser.

When the Kindle Fire was announced several weeks ago (and by the way, I bought my Fire less than an hour after it went on sale that day), one of the items promoted heavily was the web browser built into the Fire. It was called "Silk," and it was going to revolutionize the Internet web browser experience by taking the processing power out of the hands of the local machine and putting it in the hands to Amazon's massive cloud of servers. It was SUPPOSED to speed up web browsing on the Kindle Fire significantly.

But then, once the Fire was released last week, reports started coming in that the Silk browser was pretty slow, and that it actually was SLOWER when the Acceleration was running. I didn't believe it, and so I set out to see for myself. And what I found was...all of those websites were right. The browser is slower when the Accelerator is running!

To test this theory, I loaded two websites (THIS website and http://cincinnati.com, a site which--in my experience--takes a VERY long time to load) with 1) my home computer (2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo Windows 7 machine with 3 GB of RAM) and with the Fire both 2) with the accelerator turned on and 3) off. I loaded each site  five different times for each, clearing the history and cache of all three after each site visit. I then used a stop watch to see how long it took each site to fully load. Here's what I found:

Site: Sweasy.net

Attempt	Computer	Fire w/ Acceleration	Fire w/o Acceleration
1	5.9	9.2	7.3
2	3.6	14.4	8.0
3	3.7	7.4	6.3
4	3.7	11.7	7.4
5	3.7	7.4	8.2
Average	4.12	10.02	7.44

Site: Cincinnati.com

Attempt	Computer	Fire w/ Acceleration	Fire w/o Acceleration
1	4.5	11.9	12.4
2	4.9	12.8	12.1
3	4.4	11.6	11.4
4	4.1	12.3	10.9
5	3.7	11.1	10.7
	4.32	11.94	11.5

I would describe this website as taking a moderate amount of time to load (It has a Twitter feed and an eschool news feed which slow it down, as well on this day as a YouTube video on the home page which took a few second to load). After five tries, my computer loaded the page in an average of 4.12 seconds. The Kindle Fire without acceleration turned on loaded the page in 7.44 seconds, taking almost twice as long. When the accelerator was turned on, though, the Kindle Fire took more than 10 seconds to load! That's much more than twice as long as it took my computer to load, and it's 25% longer than it took the Fire to load in its "slower" mode with the accelerator turned off.

When I ran the same test at Cincinnati.com the results were a little less dramatic. There's a LOT of loading of secondary content on that site (ads and video and external news feeds), and while loading the page on my computer only took a few tenths of a second longer than this web site did, both the Silk accelerated and Silk non-accelerated tests took more than 11 seconds. The accelerated browsing still took a little longer, but this time was only .44 seconds slower than the Fire was when it had acceleration turned off.

But I guess that's missing the point. The browser is supposed to be FASTER when the accelerator is turned on, not "just a little bit slower." So regardless of whether or not the Amazon Kindle Fire is a success, I'd have to call their Silk web browser a failure. A big one. 

Voice Recognition

I don't own an iPhone, but I was so happy to hear all of the stories about the new SIRI voice control feature of the iPhone. I've heard that the program is intuitive and "smart" enough to understand what a human is saying without the human having to say something exactly the right way. And that makes me happy because I'm hoping that it will mean an improvement is coming soon to the automatic answering system.

I hate automatic answering systems when you call for help that--in the name of being more user friendly--have replaced the menu of options ("Press '1' for sales, press '2' for support...") with a system that wants you to just talk to it. Invariably, they get my message wrong no matter how carefully I try to speak. And heaven help you if you get frustrated.

I don't understand why the need to make this change. Pressing "1" for sales was pretty easy, to be frank. But no! These new systems try too hard to be fancy. My conversations typically go like this.

RECORDED VOICE: Thank you for calling (FILL IN THE BLANK). I'm here to help you. Please let me know what I can do for you. For instance, you might say "Pick up a package." Or maybe, "Schedule a delivery." Or perhaps--


ME: I need to talk to an operator about a billing issue.


(Long Pause)


RECORDED VOICE: Okay. I can help you schedule a pickup. Is the pickup address associated with the phone number from which you are dialing?


ME: I don't need to schedule a pickup. I just need to talk to an operator.


RECORDED VOICE: I'm sorry. I didn't understand. Is the pickup address associated with the phone number from which you are dialing?

ME: Billing!

RECORDED VOICE: I'm sorry. Is the pickup location in Billings, Montana?

ME: Operator!

RECORDED VOICE: I didn't catch that. Could you say it again?

ME: Operator!

RECORDED VOICE: Okay. You'd like to schedule a pickup. I can help with that. Is the pickup address associated with the phone number from which you are dialing?



(At this point I just start pounding the zero button on my phone. After about ten presses I pause, praying to the gods that an operator is going to pick up. There's a long pause, as if the phone system is punishing me for pressing the button too many times, before the recorded voice is back again.)
 
RECORDED VOICE: You entered area code 0-0-0, 0-0-0-0-0-0-0. Is this the phone number associated with the pickup address for this item?
 
ME: Oh, screw YOU!
 
RECORDED VOICE: I'm sorry. I didn't undestand. Is the phone number area code 0-0-0, 0-0-0-0-0-0-0 associated with the pickup address for this item? Say "yes" for yes, or "no" for no.
 
ME: Make me!
 
RECORDED VOICE: Okay. Let me check that phone number (VERY short pause, as if the machine KNEW there was no address associated with that number and is just TRYING to tick me off). I'm sorry, but I couldn't find a phone number associated with area code 0-0-0, 0-0-0-0-0-0-0. Is there another phone number associated with this address. Say "yes" for yes, or--
 
ME: I hope you die in whatever sort of painful way that a computer might die!
 
RECORDED VOICE: Say "yes" for yes, or "n--
 
ME: Bite ME!
 
RECORDED VOICE: I'm sorry. I didn't understand that. Could you say it again?
 
ME: (louder) BITE ME!!!!
 
RECORDED VOICE: Okay. I can help you schedule a pickup. Is the pickup address associated with the phone number from which you are dialing?


Tell me how that is easier than just pressing buttons?