Spending the weekend with Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch tablet, it's easy to see why Amazon has built a commanding lead in the Android tablet space. The hardware, design, components, software and a surprisingly useful tech support feature called May Day combine to provide a very pleasing mid-sized tablet experience.
The Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch (which has a companion 8.9-inch version in the wings), is, for now, the reigning champ in power, performance and screen resolution. Yes, it only matches the Google Nexus 7 in pixels per inch, but no other consumer tablet offers the same mobile CPU: Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 800, a quad-core component running at a zippy 2.2GHz. The Nexus 7 also has a Qualcomm processor, but it runs at 1.5GHz. Amazon's tablet also has 2GB of RAM, double the 1GB found in the Nexus 7 and roughly quadruple the memory reportedly found in the iPad Mini.
An important note about this review: Amazon told me I was looking at "near final" hardware and "not-final" software. In fact, they delivered a software update halfway through my review, which increased stability significantly.
A Redesign
While the HDX's power is impressive, the first thing most people will notice is the new design. Amazon has refashioned the body with sharp edges and bevels and an even lighter and thinner body. It's much easier to find buttons by touch.
If you find the iPad Mini's brushed-aluminum back a bit slippery, you'll appreciate the Kindle Fire HDX's soft-touch plastic. There's a beveled edge of glossy black, which houses the surprisingly powerful Dolby stereo speakers. It's a bit of a fingerprint magnet.
At 10.7 ounces, the Kindle Fire HDX weighs only slightly more than the Google Nexus 7 and slightly less than the 7.9-inch iPad mini (Wi-Fi-only model). Apple's iPad mini is thinner than the Kindle Fire HDX, and holding the two devices in either hand it's hard to tell which one weighs more.
While that difference may be difficult to discern, the remaining differences between the iPad mini and this new tablet contender are quite stark.
Like other Android tablet manufacturers, Amazon has always presented its own platform overlay and unique set of features. It now publicly calls its tablet environment "Fire OS." Version 3.0 makes it even more distinct from other Android tablets and, especially, the popular iOS environment (iOS 6 and the recently released iOS 7). This is an important consideration because your interest in the Kindle Fire HDX may depend heavily on your affinity for all things Apple or all things Android/Kindle.
The Kindle Fire HDX is recognizable as an Amazon tablet thanks to the ever-present carousel and its large icons representing all relevant app and content you've recently used. This is mostly fine. It works quite well for book covers and movie posters, but it's a poor fit for some app icons (like Twitter) and anything that doesn't have a proper icon. My FreeTime kid-friendly-environment icons, for example, were ugly boxes.
Fortunately, Amazon now offers a homepage grid of apps and content. You can put any piece of content on it by pressing and holding, and the Kindle Fire HDX will remember that as your default screen. This grid may remind some of iOS, but the icons are still quite a bit larger an there is the persistent menu bar of options at the top of the screen, which includes Shop, Games, Apps, Books, Music, Videos, Newsstand, Audiobooks, Web, Photos and Docs (not all fit on screen in portrait mode, but you can scroll through to the hidden ones).
Amazon also added a vertical task manager, which like the carousel, is content-based. It's a nifty way of switching between live apps, but offers no way of shutting down any of them. By contrast, iOS 7 lets you swipe through open apps and flick up to end any task.
May Day
Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX is a highly comprehensible device, but not everyone will find every feature easy to use and they may even run into the occasional bump in the Kindle road. That's where May Day comes in.
Customer service is by no means a new concept, but I can't recall any other modern-day tech company attempting what Amazon has set out to do with May Day. It wants, in essence, to support, potentially millions of Kindle Fire HDX tablets with live, 24/7/365 tech support.
I have no idea how this scales, but in my tests, it worked just as advertised. May Day is part of the Settings menu, which you access by swiping down from the top edge of the screen. When I tapped it, a small, roughly 1.5-inch rectangular window appeared on screen. For a moment, I was on hold, waiting for a customer-service attendant. Then Cody appeared. He helpfully moved about my screen, circled what I needed to access and, if I had let him, could have controlled my screen. It was one-way video and while the video quality was sharp, the audio was just OK, though completely intelligible.
If Amazon can handle what I expect will be a deluge of tech support calls and, sometimes, ridiculous questions, May Day could be a game changer.
A Real Ecosystem
One of my favorite things about the Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch tablet is that it's part of the Kindle ecosystem. As with Apple's iOS ecosystem, a single sign-in gives you access all of your Kindle-related content. I've tested many Kindle devices, own a Paperwhite e-reader and am an Amazon Prime member ($75 a year for all-you-can-eat streaming movies and free two-day-shipping). All my cloud-based content is automatically accessible via the Kindle Fire HDX and what I read on the Paperwhite is, as long as I'm on a Wi-Fi network, available and synced across multiple devices.
One of the most significant updates to Amazon's ecosystem is the ability to download selected Prime instant videos to your device. I was excited about this until I realized that downloading multi-gigabyte 1080p HD videos would eat up my 16 GBs of storage faster than Cookie Monster can clear a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Even so, I'm happy to report that you can download the videos and, instead of waiting for the download to complete, you can start watching them almost immediately.
Just remember it's useful to download one or two for your cross country trip and then remove them when your trip is done. Also keep in mind that while your local space is limited, Amazon offers a never-ending supply of cloud-based storage for all your Amazon-purchased content. Still, if you can afford the extra $40 for the 32GB model, I'd buy it.
Amazon has also added some nifty-second-screen viewing capabilities -– watch Amazon video on your HDTV while controlling it via your tablet — but they weren't ready in time for review.
If, however, you are viewing an Amazon movie, you'll appreciate the refreshed X-Ray. The feature now not only lets you see who each actor is in every scene, but adds in Trivia from the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database (IMDb). This works well and can turn any two-hour movie viewing experience into a three-hour-plus deep dive.
Game On
I could go on about the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX's impressive specs, but the best way to experience them is through a game like the first-person driving game, Asphalt 8 from Gameloft. For the sake of comparison, I also added the same game to an Apple iPad mini.
In side-by side tests, the Kindle Fire HDX's high-res, 1,920 x 1,200 display smoothed every curve of every car and provided stutter-free response to give the gameplay a console-like feel. The iPad mini kept up, gameplay never stuttered, but car curves were noticeably jaggy. Score one for the Kindle Fire HDX.
In virtually every instance, the Kindle Fire's exquisite screen and powerful processor made for smooth, near-perfect response on apps as varied as Twitter, the propriety Silk browser (also faster thanks to improved caching techniques), drawing apps like Sketchbook Pro and Facebook.
Another word about Silk: The proprietary browser, which speed-delivers cached web content to tablets from Amazon's own servers, is better than ever. Pages pop in faster and it renders most, like the New York Times, perfectly. It was not, however, a fan of Mashable's responsive design web site.
As for navigation, I've never been a fan of Android's native browser, so I consider Silk an improvement. That said, Amazon could learn a thing or two from Apple's Safari, especially the redesigned-for-iOS 7 edition. While Silk offers full-screen browsing, the mode hides all the page navigation in the pull-out menu on the right. As you add tabs, they eventually push other open tabs off screen. iOS 7's flippable tab view and the ability to remove a page with a gesture is far more effective. Also, Amazon separates the tabs from page navigation: forward and back sit with the pull-out menu. That's annoying and feels inconsistent.
Sing Along
Amazon's X-Ray capabilities now extend to music. Supported tunes have synchronized lyrics, which appear above the playback bar. A tap on any lyric takes you instantly to that word in the song. I had a good time repeatedly tapping words until I created a sort of rap song. If Amazon added a record button, I can only image the musical creations we'd hear.
Reading Still fundamental
The Kindle Fire HDX is one of the best magazine-reading platforms on the market and this new OS and hardware only improves the experience. Art and photography look touchably real and page turns might as well be the real thing. Amazon had recommended I download the latest Vanity Fair, however, it simply wouldn't work. Instead, I downloaded Men's Health. It's worth noting, though, that the fully high-resolution magazines are larger than their predecessors and I would recommend you delete read editions.
One Camera for All
The Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch includes s single front-facing camera (the iPad Mini has two and the Nexus 7 has one) that takes decent, if unspectacular pictures. If you do choose to take photos, however, you can try out the powerful, new image-editing software that's included as part of the Kindle Fire HDX. It has a surprising array of editing features, include redeye reduction and, yes, even a meme-creation tool. If you have a collection of photos on your Amazon cloud drive, you can download and edit any of them directly on the device.
The primary purpose of the camera, though, is HD video conferencing. Add Skype and you're ready to go. This works well and makes the HDX a good competitor to any iPad running FaceTime.
Office Friendly
Amazon has added a bunch of enterprise-friendly features, including the ability to connect to a corporate VPN, centrally manage Kindle Fire HDX tablets via MDM (mobile device management) solutions and print emails and calendar entries wirelessly. While wirelessly printing a Word doc does work, provided you have the right plug-in installed, I couldn't test the rest of these features. They're scheduled to arrive with a Fire OS 3.1 update. Even so, I would say the ability to integrate Kindle tablets into an office environment is another benefit for those who take their tablets from the home-to-office and back.
Battery Life
In a day of normal use that included reading, shopping, watching video, browsing the web, drawing, playing a console-level game, taking and editing photos, the Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch's battery lasted throughout the day and night. I would say it easily lives up to the 11-hour promise.
Propped Up
Along with the Kindle Fire HDX's new design comes a brand-new case that offers a pretty neat trick: the ability to fold, origami-style into a stand that can be used in portrait or landscape mode. Like the iPad mini cover, it includes magnets that put the Kindle Fire HDX to sleep when you fold it over the screen; to turn it into a stand, you pinch the center together. I liked this quite a bit. You can't adjust the angle of the covers, although repositioning the tablet will give you a different position.
What to Buy
At $229 for 16 GB (as long as you accept the offers, which I do not mind at all, especially now that some are extra-special Kindle Fire-owners-only ones), the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX meets the Nexus 7 base price and beats the cheapest iPad mini by $100. While I think the Kindle Fire HDX screen blows away the iPad for sharpness, color depth and even lack of glare, the size difference between the mini and HDX's screen is noticeable. When it comes to a tablet, even a mid-sized one, I do prefer a larger screen. It will be interesting to see what happens when Apple finally delivers the Retina iPad mini.
Personal preferences aside, it is hard to beat the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX for price, performance and expertly integrated ecosystem. More so than any tablet on the market, Amazon's tablets have always been built for content consumption. According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, they sell them at cost. That's because Amazon will make its money on all the goodies you buy from their ever-present shopping platform.
This is not a criticism. I use so many of Amazon's services that an Amazon-centric device with killer specs that lets me enjoy books, movies, music, access the web, my e-mail and documents all from one device is quite appealing.
Plus, the combination of the utterly unique (for tablets, at least) May Day tech support and effective FreeTime parental controls makes the Kindle Fire HDX a near-perfect first-time tablet. If I switched from iOS to Android, the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX would be my first choice and it's definitely the 7-inch Android tablet I'll be recommending to friends.
Amazon is currently accepting pre-orders. An LTE-ready model will cost you $329 (16GB). Do you think you'll buy an Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch? Let me know in the comments below.
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