It's a modern chipset, an adequate amount of storage, and the required radios for most of what you'll do (though it's missing a GPS chip and NFC, if you're worried about future-proofing). In all, it's a tidy package, but not unexpected, and not necessarily the cutting edge. The wildly hyperbolic Amazon PR page for the Fire HD describes "loud, rumbling movie soundtracks," and "room-filling stereo sound." You won't get anything near those lofty renditions, but they do sound quite nice, and it's a welcome change to have stereo sound (at least in landscape orientation). The speakers I mentioned earlier are Dolby Digital-blessed and dual-driven. If you dig enough in some apps, you can find the stock Android camera, but I couldn't get it to do anything but change my photo in Skype. The camera mounted under the screen on the front of the Fire is listed as an HD lens, and it appears that it takes photos at a 720p resolution. There's also Bluetooth, that fancy MIMO Wi-Fi that Amazon made a big deal out of (more on that below), as well as an accelerometer, light sensor, and gyroscope. Inside you'll find a 1.2GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, a PowerVR GPU, and either 16GB or 32GB of storage (I tested the 16GB version). This is one of those areas where one longs for the details of the iPad, with its clear-to-the-touch placement of switches and buttons.Īs part of Amazon's fight to prove it can do hardware right, it's equipped the Fire HD with a fairly modern set of specs, and even boasts about its GPU prowess and CPU speeds. They are not only too closely positioned, but their extremely low profiles make them hard to distinguish and sometimes hard to press, depending on which direction you've got the device situated. One quibble I have is the placement and depth of the power button and volume rockers. The tablet is thin enough and light enough that it feels comfortable in your hands, and is particularly well-suited for book reading in portrait mode. Overall the design is utilitarian, but not unwelcome. It's a big improvement over the first Fire. The Fire HD fits comfortably in your hands in either landscape or portrait - and just as I noticed with the Nexus 7, the 7-inch form factor seems generally better suited to transportation and light use, like bedtime reading. It weighs just under a pound, and is both taller and wider than the Nexus 7 by small amounts. 01 inches) but not as thin as the new iPad. The device is slightly thinner than the Nexus 7 (an almost imperceptible. The Fire has a soft-touch black backing, with a thin plastic strip spanning the length of it that houses a set of stereo speakers. 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. At first glance, the Fire HD isn't exactly something that you'd notice in a lineup of tablets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |