Amazon Backpedals On Encryption, But Fire "Still Sucks"

Just a day after it made headlines for announcing that it would remove encryption from its line of FireOS devices, reports Ars Technica, the company has reverted the change, and says that encryption will again be a user-selectable option, with an update to come sometime this Spring. Judging from comments here on Slashdot, that ought to please a lot of people. However, encryption isn't the Fire's only problem; Ricki Jennings at ComputerWorld has collected some of the user reaction to the change, and says that anemic hardware means that even with this small course correction, the Fire tablets themselves "still suck." I'm not so sure; I bought one of the low-end Fire tablets and returned it, disappointed not in the hardware (seemed not bad at all for $50, with a decent screen, snappy video, and sound that was better than reviews had led me to expect) but rather by the intentional limitations of the OS itself.

Comments

Artificial limitations suck

[iampiti]

In an era in which computers, of all kinds including smartphones and tables, are powerful enough to do most things one could ever imagine, it's irritating that manufacturers impose artificial software limitations.
Those include: Being unable to install software from outside of an official app store (iOS and Windows Phone), being unable to uninstall certain bundled programs (You can't uninstall certain Google apps even from unlocked Android phones), being unable to install apps on SD cards (Android), etc... All of them can be summed up as not allowing the user to be root on their own device.

Re:Artificial limitations suck

[elrous0]

Do you really think Amazon would be selling the hardware that cheap if it weren't locked down? They sell a $200+ tablet for $50 because they expect you to buy more than $150+ of Amazon stuff on it. That wouldn't work very well if they just let you buy from whoever on it.