Owners of the Amazon Kindle Fire have apparently been less than pleased with their newly purchased tablet. Many owners have even begun returning the Fire to Amazon, citing a range of reasons from the device lacking any external volume control and an ill-placed power button that’s too easy to unintentionally switch off to a flaky touchscreen that doesn’t always like to play nice. Another concern is that the Kindle Fire lacks any sort of privacy. This means that anyone who uses the device after you will be able to see anything and everything that you’ve done on the tablet.
Last week, a usability expert by the name of Jakob Nielsen threw in his two cents, which were anything other than nice, in terms of the device’s usability. Add that news, which was a pretty big story in itself, with the endless amounts of customer complaints Amazon has received over the past few weeks, and we’ve got ourselves an urgent need for an update.
Amazon’s master plan with the Kindle Fire all along has been to sell the device for as cheap as possible (even at a price which causes it to take an initial loss) and put one in the hands of as many people as they can. Once they’ve cornered their fair share of the market, they intend to make money by selling music, movies and books directly from Amazon — pretty simple concept, right? Well, not if people think the device sucks. Amazon knows they have to do something if they intend to keep focus on the tablet, and it looks like they’re at least trying to step up to the plate on this one. “In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,†said Drew Herdener, a company spokesperson.
There will be improvements in performance and multi-touch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. Pretty nifty for those of you us who frequent those adult websites from an Android tablet, don’t you agree? Of course, I’ve never done such a thing, but if I ever did, it’s nice to know I won’t get caught by the wife.
We’ll be keeping our eyes out for the update to roll in. While we wait, why not drop us a line to share your Kindle Fire experiences if you own one?
Source: NY Times
