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Many Early Adopters of the Amazon Fire Are Unhappy
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the Kindle Fire, Amazon's heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success, with many of its early users packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer. A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing and the touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky. Amazon's response was: 'In less than two weeks, we're rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire.' The only problem with that is many of the complaints are hardware related and no amount of software can fix one of the early blunders: 'The fire is shipped in a box that advertised on the outside of the box exactly what it is. "Hello, you, thief, please come steal me!"' wrote one would-be customer who, as you might guess, had her Fire stolen and was left with the box. This was supposed to be an iPad killer, with its much lower price point, but Apple is tough to beat because most of its mistakes are software-based."
"There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing."
I don't know the situation for the complainers, but my Kindle Fire has a passcode enabled.
Settings > Security > Lock Screen Password
The Fire arrives configured for Amazon One Click purchases, and the option to disable this does not work. Anyone who picks up your Fire will be able to order anything they like without any password, PIN, or other attempt to verify the purchase being made.
See here: Serious Security Flaw In The Kindle Fire
Then they shouldn't market it as a general tablet. Don't blame people for measuring it against the same yardstick that they market the device to in their ads.
The link for it is right not he main Amazon page, and the ad above is pretty clearly being marketed as a tablet.
http://www.amazon.com/
Good at book reading? Sorry it takes a turn for the worse for book reading. The display has a horrible glare to it, it attracts finger prints like its the next big thing, and the page turning is atrocious. You have to very carefully hold the device on the edges to avoid turning the page because the slightest on screen touch could jump you pages, or depending where you press even chapters ahead. The volume control is definitely an annoyance as you have to obstruct your view of whatever your watching or pause it. I also hate the lack of "forward" button. Its easy to press back on accident and there's no forward. When your going through book collections it will not remember your last location in the list forcing you to rebrowse from the beginning after going into a book, plus for a book reading device there's no button to go to the book list other than the home button and then the book list. There's no directory structure or categories for books its all one big jumbo collection with no organization. The apps market place is restricted to amazon app store only and many apps are blocked for fire use for no good reason(like twitter, but i don't use that one). The android market place works perfectly fine on the fire but you have to root the device to get it on there.
The screen can be very sensitive but it doesn't always work, sometimes you have to press something 2 or 3 times, but the very slightest touch elsewhere will trigger something you don't want.