Kindle Fire is sold out forever, Kindle Fire 2 expected next week | Hacker News Reader

Kindle Fire is sold out forever, Kindle Fire 2 expected next week

geek.com

43 pointsukdm50 comments

Count me out - I was a launch-day customer for the Kindle Fire 1, and I will frankly never trust Amazon again when it comes to devices. I still have a hard time believing that Amazon willfully and knowingly shipped such an awful product.

With excellent 7" tablets like the Nexus 7 out in the wild, I have a hard time seeing why someone will buy a crippled, less featured, less responsive, slower device with god-awful usability.

I bought it too the day it was released. Returned it the very next day - it was horrible.

May be they'll do a better job this time. They are surely aware of newer/better competition.

True that, the original Amazon coated Android sucks a lot. But I couldn't be happier with JB on my Kindle Fire, it is AMAZINGLY fast, and I have never experienced any kind of lagginess whatsoever.

I had mine as a hackathon prize and if I had to buy one I'd buy a Nexus 7, but heck, when I got mine there were no $199 tablets as good as the Kindle Fire.

I agree that the Kindle Fire is awful, but the Kindle 4 (the small one without the keyboard) is brilliant. And I'm eagerly awaiting next year's version.

And if buying a dud upsets you, why buy fancy new gadgets on launch day in the first place? Just wait a week or two for the reviews to come in. That's just common sense.

IMO the Kindle Fire dropped below the generously low bar for a dud - I've bought plenty of dud devices before without feeling too raw about it (the iPad 1, for example, which didn't really find a solid use until the second iteration).

My issue with the Kindle Fire is that the "dud-ness" of the device seems willfully negligent as opposed to merely missing the mark.

It's like buying a video game that just didn't turn out to be very fun, vs. a video game that's no-fun and crashes every 5 minutes. One is disappointing, the other is infuriating in its unprofessionalism and lack of respect for their own product.

Can you expand on your comment about how the iPad didn't find a solid use until the second iteration? Not sure what that means.

jskopek covers a lot of it - it was a little too heavy, a little too bulky, a little too unresponsive, that you just didn't want to carry it around everywhere - and without having it on you, you'd never really get to use it.

It also took quite a long time for most apps you'd care about to release iPad-compatible updates, by which time the iPad 2 was out and was lighter, smaller, and much faster.

The browsing experience was particularly painful on iPad 1 - loading things took a long time, and the new, bigger screen practically begged for multi-tab browsing, except there's not enough RAM to hold even two tabs at once, so switching tabs was just constant reloads. Lots of little things that aren't huge problems by themselves, but contributed to not using the device.

Calling the iPad 1 a dud is just plain ridiculous.

I owned an iPad and an iPad Retina, and I can also attest to a huge jump in use between those versions. The first iPad was excellent, but it was just a little to slow, little too heavy, and little too big. Those issues added up to a product that was fun to use, but less so than a laptop. Truth be told, I think the iPad still suffers from a size/weight issue. If the iPad mini ever becomes a think, I expect my usage of it will change drastically

Those are fair points, but I don't agree with your general point of view. After all, it doesn't matter much if the product is just slightly lousy or awful. You don't end up using the products so the money is equally wasted in both cases.

Let's suppose 30% of all products are duds (i.e. you wouldn't buy them after playing with them for 10 minutes or reading a few reviews about them). So when you buy a product a launch day you pay a premium for getting your hands on it 2 weeks early. The kindle fire was a $199 device, I think, so you're then paying a $60 premium for having it a week or two early. Whether you want to take on that risk is entirely up to you. I personally wouldn't take on the risk, because I know myself well enough to predict I'll feel disproportionately bad when I waste money on a gadget I don't use. It looks like you're the same way. Most people aren't suited to gambling like this.

So you have to take a look at all the anticipated consequences of buying early. And the sour taste of ending up with a dud is part of that. By blaming Amazon for a lousy product you lose sight of the more important conclusion: that this outcome was completely predictable and avoidable.

Specifically what did you find so awful about the Kindle Fire? I bought one and I'm quite happy with it.

I've experienced some problems with connectivity and the browser freezing occasionally but that's it. A hard reboot every once in awhile seems to solve both.

What makes the other tablets so much better? I haven't used them so I have no point of reference.

The Kindle Fire is very slow, runs an old version of Android (seriously, 4.1 on the Nexus 7 is fantastic), and is maliciously limited: the Fire disallow installing Google Play if you install it yourself unless the device is rooted, for example. And it feels ridiculously cheap in the hands compared to a Nexus 7 (which isn't perfect, but the 7" size is great) or an iPad (which feels much better but the 10" size is like carting around a small dinner plate).

I bought the iPad 1 and the Kindle Fire on their respective launch dates. IMHO, the original iPad was awesome. The kindle Fire should not be placed in the same category.

The iPad 1 worked very well for my use cases (main one was an instant-on, reliable web browser). At the time, no other device offered me that capability. And I tried many options. For this use case, the original iPad is fine. I have yet to upgrade to the iPad 2/3 (my wife has the latest one and she uses it for web browsing and games).

The thing about the Kindle Fire is that I now don't trust Amazon enough to buy a product from them on launch day. This is a big deal because I have (used to have?) very high regard for Amazon. They broke my trust.

Apple still retains that trust btw. They mess up badly too (iTunes is a train wreck) but have a better batting average. Google does not (I got burned with the Nexus One and Google TV).

Agreed. The first iPad was amazing for a first gen device.

I love Amazon, have a Kindle 3, Prime, spend thousands a year there... but I'm getting pissed at their handling of firmware. The Kindle Keyboard is getting regular steady updates, font rendering, smoothing, functionality and features.... none of which are getting shipped to the 3... seems as soon as the Keyboard came out, they decided that was it for anything older.

The kindle 3 and the keyboard are the same thing...

> ... why buy fancy new gadgets on launch day in the first place?

Because the Kindle launch day was years ago and it had matured into a solid, capable product. Amazon appears to have taken working code and deliberately broken it on purpose. Their engineering management seems to have lost the ability to even reverse engineer their own existing products.

You do realize that the Kindle and the Kindle Fire are two completely different products right?

Are you talking about them crippling e-ink Kindles? Because if so, you are blatantly wrong - the newer versions are faster, crisper, lighter, better in just about every regard.

If you are talking about the Kindle Fire, then there is probably little to no overlap in the software running between them.

Completely different? No. The core e-reader features should have been identical. Searching an Amazon e-book, for example, should have simply reused to code they already had. Instead e-book searches on the Fire are not indexed, so there is no way to search your device for words or phrases. You cannot even use the fucking dictionary because it takes many minutes to do its linear scan.

The same thing is true for organizing books into collections. This was a solved problem. Even if Amazon could not reuse the GUI code, they had the existing collections GUI as a functional specification of what needed to be done. But no, instead my Fire gives me a giant pile of hundreds of unsearchable, unorganized e-books.

Or what about the synchronization feature? It lets you synchronize your notes, highlights, and last page read across all your Kindles. Amazon had solved this problem. They had working code that at the very least could have been used as a cheat sheet fore the Fire. But no, they managed to break that too.

The techmical execution of the Fire is the second most bot hed software product I have ever experienced, the worst being a video game from the 90s that I picked up remaindered for $2.

I agree, Kindle Fire wasn't a pleasing product. It was slow, the browser crashed even on Amazon's site, got a defective one the first time (colored lines running along the screen), the customer service wasn't up to the par (had to wait a week to get the replacement), the market place was lacking. I hope they get it better this time!

While I don't dislike my Kindle Fire, Amazon trying to fork their own version of Android was a huge failure on their part. I know the easiest way to get to me to ignore the Fire 2 is to slap in another old, custom version of Android in there.

I've got a Kindle Fire, and while it's not great, it's not that bad either. The biggest problem, like someone else says, is that they don't use 'real' Android, so you don't get all the nice Google apps like Gmail and Maps. Also, input seems limited to English, whereas my Samsung and Nexus 7 can both switch easily between English and Italian.

With the existence of the Nexus 7, which is just about completely superior to the Fire, there really isn't a reason to get the Fire. Let's hope the Fire 2 ups the game some.

I'm so disappointed with my (now second) Nexus 7 that I'm pretty much jaded on all Android devices, including the Kindle Fire. The software is okay, but the hardware is terrible.

I have the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire.

A bonus of the Kindle Fire is the battery life. It seems to be better than the Nexus 7 (I need to measure this).

One problem with the N7 (an otherwise fantastic device), I can't get the screen dim enough for reading in a dark room.

The screen always seems too bright even on the lowest setting.

So I still use my Fire for night time reading and taking to the Gym.

Perhaps that is why the battery of the Fire seems to last longer (I need to check the devices when I get home).

While the fire is clunky, tt gets the job done.

I just can't believe how good a $200 tablet can be (first the Fire was good enough, then the Nexus 7 which as just short of amazing)

Regarding screen brightness at night, you could give this a try: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.haxor

The Kindle Fire 2 had better be some hot shit, because competing with the Nexus 7 isn't going to be easy.

That was my thought. Nexus 7 took everyone by surprise. I finally got my hands on it and was blown away by how much better it was than the cheapo Android 7" tablets I've previously used.

Nexus 7 came out at IO, 2 months ago. So it's hard to believe Amazon could have done much with the Fire 2 after they saw the Nexus 7 (unless they managed to see it before it came out, unlikely). It would be nice to believe they could independently come up with something as great as Nexus 7, but coming from the baseline of Fire 1, we'll probably have to wait for v3 for the competition to get serious.

"Even so, why has Amazon chosen to announce its tablet has sold out completely rather than continuing to manufacture it or having the Kindle Fire 2 ready to announce?"

Well most everyone believes that Apple is about to announce a 7.85" iPad which would be a competitor, perhaps Amazon wants to put some 'doubt' into the minds of folks who are using their iPads primarily as e-readers?

My speculation would be that the competitive threat of a 7" iPad is that its a good e-reader, and it does all the other cool stuff an iPad can do. Vs a Kindle Fire (one or two) which is primarily an e-reader, and it can browse the web a bit, and oh yeah its really cost effective for that.

Depending on the price difference between the Fire/iPad this exchange might 'price out' the value to consumers for the extra features the iPad offers. Should be interesting to watch.

This is shaping up to be a interesting fourth quarter for the 7" tablet consumer market. Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are finally going head-to-head with their own devices (where they control both the software and hardware). It will be interesting to see how consumers respond.

I really enjoy my Kindle Fire, as an ebook reader, rss reader, and web browser it is awesome. 7" form factor is great. Comparing the Nexus 7 to the year old tech of the Kindle Fire (it was originally the BB Playbook), is a bit silly. I'm sure the Kindle Fire 2 will be faster, better, etc. I wonder how long til a Kindle Fire Phone....

I always thought putting a tablet against your face was a bit awkward, which I assumed was why all these tablets didn't have phone features.

My boss uses his as a phone, and it is awkward. That said, a bluetooth headset should work fine.

The current Kindle Fire does not support bluetooth.

Well, it doesn't support making calls either. We were talking about an hypothetical Kindle Fire Phone.

The Nexus 7 out shines the Kindle Fire, not because the N7 is more powerful, the N7 beats out the Kindle Fire because it isn't crippled.

A Kindle Fire with CM9 on it is only worse than the N7 because CM9 is buggier and ICS is uglier than stock Jelly Bean.

EDIT: I ditched my Kindle Fire for a N7 before Jellybean was available for the Fire.

I got the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet on release, and the difference in quality (favoring the Nook) was dramatic. The Fire felt and performed like a cheap Chinese knockoff tablet.

Aren't the Fires loss-making? That may be the reason for it being "sold out" till the Fire 2

They might have been on launch (although i strongly doubt it personally- see cost of Chinese tablets- which also get no benefit from market sales), but they certainly aren't now.

They might of been loss making at first, but people seem to forget that mass manufacturing and general technology improvements make things a lot cheaper to make over the life of the product.

It's always difficult to know for sure but the calculated BOM cost is $143.

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230653/TechInsights...

I've never gotten a Kindle prediction right. But that doesn't mean I won't keep trying:

This time:

    Fire 7" @$129
    Fire 10" @$299
    Still &roid. 
    Color-e-ink-touch model: $89. 
    No phone.

You may not be right, but you can always be wrong with style! :-)

I like your numbers. I hope you're right.

Now, if Amazon would just add EPUB support to the Kindles, I'd buy that largescreen DX in a heartbeat.

They may not have it natively, but you can download epub readers (or alternatively, Calibre can be used to convert epub -> mobi).

I really don't want to convert to mobi, because it's a less expressive format.

Are these epub readers downloadable without having to root the device? That would be worth considering.

You can sideload an .apk without rooting the device, yes.

Wonder whether the availability of the Amazon App Store in Germany (starting today) is a coincidence, or whether the Fire 2 will become international (IIRC the same as happened with the regular Kindle).

I wonder how much they will target increased performance vs cost/power reduction. After all, the original fire was fast enough for the basic content consumption which seems to be the core idea of it.

Sold out? Or taken off the market? I wonder if they have any remaining inventory that they're deciding not to sell and "selling out" is to try to create demand for the next device.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case, and they use a woot! daily deal/part of a wootoff to clean out remaining stock later after the 2 launches.

Did Amazon ever fix the problem where your bookmarks would disappear, if you downloaded an update for a book?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com