Along the bottom you'll find a Micro USB and Micro HDMI jack (you can mirror content to a big screen). The sides of the device are downturned from front to back, broken only by a headphone jack, volume rocker, and power / sleep button integrated into the top (or right side in landscape) of the device. The front of the Fire is eaten up by its display and a small camera peering out through the black bezel which runs around the screen. The device is little more than a matte black rectangle with the requisite rounded corners. In that sense, the Fire serves its purpose fabulously. These days, it's not really art or science deciding how slabs look, but more like a kind of desire for familiarity.
KINDLE FIRE 7 FULL
But are the hits going to keep coming, or is the new Fire HD a swing and a miss? Find out in the full review below.Īt first glance, the Fire HD isn't exactly something that you'd notice in a lineup of tablets. Amazon also wants to hit them where only Amazon can: retail. And that plan seems to be something like this: hit them on price, hit them on ecosystem, and hit them where it hurts the most - product design. A product with an attitude, a directive, a plan. The new, $199 Fire HD feels like something very different. The original Kindle Fire felt like an experiment, a 'can we do this?' moment for Amazon. These aren't just tablets - they are portals to all the company is, whether it's the cloud services on the backend, retail tie-ins up front, or that new part of Amazon: the one that makes high-end consumer hardware. During its event last Wednesday, CEO Jeff Bezos was focused on not just the new products, but about what they mean to Amazon and its customers. It was barely a week ago that the world watched Amazon begin a magical transformation from that of a humble multinational that retails every product ever made in the world, to that of a consumer electronics powerhouse that wants to bring the fight to Apple on the tablet front. To put a review of the Kindle Fire HD in perspective, you have to peer just a tiny bit into the past.