The Fire doesn't seem anything like an iPad competitor, nor was it meant to be. It's a Kindle for media that aren't books; or a re-take on the iPod for "the cloud", if you'd rather. IMHO, it fills that role very well.
I was excited about the Kindle Fire, even knowing that it wasn't meant to be a true tablet - but a media consumption device instead.
I'm still very disappointed. The bottom line is, the UI is barely serviceable, there are performance, stability, and battery life issues galore - serious, deal-breaking ones.
This goes beyond what the device is and isn't "meant to be". This goes right to whether or not it is a competent personal electronic device. My answer leans towards "no".
I had the Kindle Fire drain 50% of my battery idling over night. The culprit? I dared set up email on the device - yes, one of those big advertised features right there on the Fire's home page.
The UI is unresponsive. Not only is it jerky and laggy, but buttons routinely stop responding altogether. Using the device is a chore, since you're never sure if you hit a button it'll actually do something, or if you'll have to jab the screen again and see what happens.
We'll ignore all the myriad UI design problems with the device and excuse it, since it's $200 and apparently that means it's supposed to be able to get away with atrocious UI.
The music player is terrible. When reading books or otherwise moving about the device the music will cut out and randomly fast forward. That's disregarding the myriad of UI problems (including sorting "The Beatles" under "T").
The reader app, and the video app, are the only two things in the entire device that I'd consider a win. They're the only ones where I can genuinely think to myself "hey, this will help me buy content I want". The rest of the device fails utterly at this goal, which if you look at it, is the entire raison d'etre for the device.
