Kindle Fire HD 7 review : Focus on Content, not on bling!

Kindle Fire HD is the second generation tablet device from Amazon, built on the huge success of Kindle Fire. After the success of Apple’s iPad, Samsung and few other Android tablet manufacturers tried extremely hard to emulate the success of iPad but it was Amazon that showed the path to succeed with tablets that are powered by Google’s Android with half baked Android UI. What Amazon did is that instead of focusing on design and bling, they focused on content and the ease with which consumers can access the content. The same is visible in Kindle Fire HD. To be frank, there is nothing much to explore in Kindle Fire HD’s Fire OS. Boot up, add your amazon account, load content, start using content. It is as simple as that. Before we even start, below are screenshots that we took while setting up Fire HD for the first time that explain UI. And to be frank, that is all that is there to the UI. Unlike our earlier reviews that are usually very very long, this one is going to be short yet detailed! Lets hit it! Packaging and Design Amazon says that the packaging is certified frustration free. What this means is that all you need to do is pull out the container, rip off the paper seal, life the lid up and that’s it. The packaging is minimal and there is nothing in the box except the tablet and USB cable for data transfer and charging the device. The pocket on the inside of the lid holds a leaflet that explains in short how to charge, turn on and unlock Fire HD. Below are list of photos that relate to Packaging. Lets take a look at the tablet now. The front side is dominated by the gorgeous 7” HD display and a front facing camera sits on top of the display. Do note that there is no rear camera and the front cam is pretty good for a video call. Also, there are no hard keys too. The bezel around the display is just wide enough to rest thumbs and keep accidental swipes/presses away. The back and the area around the bezel has a rubbery feel and is matte. The rubbery material alleviates grip, keeps fingerprints away and does add to the looks. The dual stereo speakers are places on either side of the metallic strip on the rear. The strict though is entirely for aesthetics and the kindle logo is neatly etched on the right side of the strip. Amazon logo and some FCC and device info are printed at the bottom as is visible in the picture above. While the left side is clean without any ports (except that one stereo speaker), the right side has volume rocket, 3.5mm port and lock/power button. The bottom of the tablet holds a micro-HDMI and micro-USB ports and the microphone is located at the top. Display is the main asset for Kindle Fire HD. 1280×720 resolution IPS panel is sheer quality! We always preferred IPS panel over AMOLED panels for its top notch quality and superb viewing angles. The same is evident on Kindle Fire HD. Everything looks sharp, colours are accurately rendered and text is incredibly sharp. Those dual stereo speakers are definitely among the best available for tablets. Sound is loud and clear which means that you need not run for desktop speakers or earphones/headphones every time you want to watch a movie or video clip. User Interface Fire HD is driven by Fire OS Kindle Fire HD UI is the simplest we have seen on Android tablets. In fact, only iOS’s icon driven interface is more simpler. Amazon took Android OS, did bucket load of customization to put the content in drivers seat and interface is rear seat, created in-house application store. In short, even though Fire HD runs Android OS, it actually is an entirely different ecosystem (devices + OS + app store + apps). Anyways, it ain’t difficult to root Fire HD and load Google Play store and Google Apps bundle. The lock screen randomly lists existing offers on Kindle Store and you get an option to either go directly to the offer page by swiping on the left side and swipe on right side unlocks the screen. If you expect the home to have multiple screens with support for widgets, shortcuts etc., you will be in for a surprise. Fire HD’s home screen is divided into two parts. The top slide menu contains shortcuts to all built in content types (games, apps, music, movies, books, web etc.). The centre area is where you see the list of applications that you have used and the recently used apps/content is listed first. For quick access, you can add apps and content to favourites and favourites can be accessed by clicking the ‘star’ icon on bottom right corner. It is good to see that one of the best features of Android OS is brought into Fire OS, the notification bar. As you can see in the following screenshots, the functionality remains mostly the same. You get one click access to settings (by clicking on more) and you can side swipe to clear notifications or push clear all to clear all notifications. Apps and app store There are handful of pre-loaded apps that form part of the OS and all these apps share a common UI. First lets take a look at the store The application/books/music/videos store has a very similar User Interface. Sometimes the UI’s simplicity is a big boon but in some cases, you feel like you need just a bit more options to fiddle with. At the top is the search bar and below the bar, there is a horizontally organized menu containing links to ‘Best Sellers’, New releases, categories etc. Then comes the carousel that lists featured items and deal of the day items. Even though Amazon introduced their application store very late, there are loads of quality applications to choose from and hey, all you need to do is install a 3rd party application store using which you can install Google Play applications. Below the carousel, you will find horizontally scrolling lists, content of the lists vary based on content that you are looking for. For example, if you are in applications zone, you see lists for ‘Recommended for you’, ‘Featured New Releases’, ‘New for you’ etc. If you are in Books section, you will see lists like ‘Best Sellers’, ‘Nobel Prize Winners’, ‘Recommended for you’, Award Winners’, ‘Best Books of the year’ etc. On clicking menu icon for the app, you can check your subscriptions, check application updates, promos, items that you added to ‘save for later’, category lists and help topics. On opening an item, you can check the customer reviews, more detail on the item, screenshots, the famous Amazon list ‘Customers Who Bought This item Also Bought’ and of course, make a purchase. You can also save the item for purchase at later point of time, report issue or share the item (detail only) to your friends. Once you purchase an item/app, you can place them on your device or you can put them on cloud storage for future use. Apps application is where all your purchased/downloaded applications are listed. The top of the app has tabs to switch between apps on cloud and apps on your device. The grid layout is unintuitive, the icons are a bit too large which means that if you have tons of apps installed, you have to swipe a lot. You can opt for list view but we suggest you to stick to icon grid as list view is needs more swipes and scrolling than icon grid (of course). A long press on an icon gives you option to add/remove from favourites and to remove the application from device. You can head to app store right from this application in case you want to get more apps. At first, the whole design looks a bit confusing and crammed but once you get used to it, it will feel better. We, though, think that the much cleaner look of Google Play store is much better than the cluttered look of Kindle store and it helps much more if you are on a 7″ tablet. Books When it comes to books, we don’t think there is a match for Amazon. First, there is this mega catalogue of books, second is the superb feature called ‘Kindle Owners Lending Library’ (available only to eligible Kindle owners in USA with Amazon Prime account) and finally, there is this superb Books application for Kindle Fire HD. Books home screen gives you list of books that you have on your device and on your cloud. You can sort the titles by Author/Recent/Title. We prefer Recent as that will place the books that we recently read on the top of the list. You can head to Kindle book store from the app by clicking on ‘store’ link at top right corner. Opening a book takes you straight to the last read page or to the first page if you open the book for the first time. While reading a book, you have access to

• Change font size, colour, background colour, margins, font type and turn on text to speech
• Go to a specific page number
• Open notes
• X-Ray. This is my favourite feature of all. On activating X-ray, you get a list of characters that are mentioned in that specific page and you can go to each character’s bio and get more info on them. The same features works damn well when you are watching movies or TV Shows where X-raying will open character bios and actor’s pages from IMDb.
• Share to friends and social network
• Add or remove bookmark for the page

If your book or PDF has menu structure, the same appears on Books app using which you can jump between chapters. Search functionality is one of the strongest points for this app. Apart from X-Ray, you can head to a specific page number, a click on a word instantly shows definition of the word and gives you more options and you can search for a word in the book (similar to how we do a PDF search). Adding notes and highlighting text too is very easy. All you need to do is click on a word and then drag to select the part of text that you want to highlight or add to notes (similar to how one selects text in iOS). You can share your saved notes and highlights on social networks. Web Browser If Amazon’s Silk browser supported Flash, we would’ve rated it 10/10. The start screen is just perfect. Similar to all other apps, there is a search bar at the top, below which there are horizontal scrolling lists that make it very easy for you to head to webpages. The ‘most visited’ pages at the top lists your most browsed web pages which means that you need not worry about bookmarking all those sites that you use most. Next is ‘Trending Now’ list which contains the sites that are getting heavy traffic right now. Then comes ‘Selected Sites’ list which is more like ‘Recommended pages’ features. When it comes to performance, the web pages open pretty fast, there is support for tabbed browsing, you can share to social networks and mail directly from the browser. Next to the search bar at the top lie tabs that take you to your bookmarks list and your browsing history. To the left of the address bar, there is ‘bookmark’ icon. You can either type a web address in the address bar or enter search terms. Bing is the default search engine btw. The right side bar gives you options to open starter page, share active page, search in page, settings, downloads list, enable full screen mode, open favourites or head to home screen. Long press on a tab gives you options to close tab(s), add active page to bookmarks, add the page to device favourites etc. In case you come across content that your browser cannot render, you get option to complete the action using another browser/application.   E-Mail, Contacts and Calendar Pretty basic we would say, in line with all built-in applications. E-Mail app’s main screen has a two pane layout. Left pane shows folders in your email account(s) while the right pane gives list of emails that are in the folder that you have selected. When you select an email, the UI shifts to a different two pane layout where the left pane lists emails while the right pane shows email body. At the top there are options to create new mail, respond the email that is currently open and to delete the email. Apart from this there is nothing much to do. Good thing is that even for a 7″display and with the onscreen keypad active, there is just enough room to see the email body that you are composing. From the calendar app, you have option to add/view/edit events, send invites to your contacts using which they can add the same event to their calendar. While viewing your calendar, you have list, day, week and month views to choose from that you can set by clicking on respective tabs at the top. Good thing is that you can actually have multiple calendars to use and this will be helpful if you want to keep your work and personal calendars separate. Contacts app again, is as basic as it can be. From contacts app, you can add/edit/remove contact and share contact via mail/social networks/messaging clients. Good thing here is that you can synchronize your contact with multiple e-accounts. Amazon’s cloud account is where your contacts get stored/syncs by default. Also, Skype app comes pre-loaded from which you can do video and audio calls. Music, Videos, Photos and Audiobooks These are the apps that suffer from overly simplistic user interface. The music player is absolutely basic and it feels as if you are using music player from the days of Symbian S60. Music player’s home screen gives you option to open playlists, artists, albums, songs. You open respective list and start playing. The audio quality on the other hand is superb. Even without the equalizer, the audio quality is top notch and we liked the neutral audio quality. There are no bundled headset and we suggest you buy one that complements the neutral audio. Only settings you get is playback controls, turn shuffle/repeat on/off, go to artist/album section on Amazon music store, add a song to playlist. In Photos application, the home screen lists albums that are stored on your device and also on Amazon cloud. Once you add your Facebook account, your photos/albums will be visible in photos app under cloud section. The albums are listed in large icon grid and once you open an album, the photos are listed in a nice tiled layout where each tile is of a different size. Click on a photo and you can start sliding (like everywhere else) to go through photos. Only settings available here are mail photo, share photo to social networks, download photo from cloud, add photo to favourites, remove photo from device. There isn’t much to say about videos application. You get a list of videos loaded on the device when you open the app, play the video and when you are done, delete the video. That’s all you have from this application. Thanks to the high quality panel, the videos look superb and are detailed.   Wrap Up If you are one of those who are looking for a tablet that can do a lot of things, give you lot of customization options, a flashy UI with some gimmicks here and there, Kindle Fire HD is not the one for you. To be frank, Fire HD sits between a full fledged tablet and an e-book reader. This one is best suited for those who prefer content over anything else. The content in Amazon store is vast and given how minimalistic a user interface is, it doesn’t take much time to get used to. We end our review here but do wait for our Nexus 7 review, at the end of which, we will discuss which one’s better.