Not a Good Sign When a Product Is Compared to the Edsel

David Streitfeld, reporting for the NYT on customer reaction to the Kindle Fire:

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer. […]

“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman.

There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.

The whole article is pretty damning. Does anyone love the Kindle Fire? I got to play with one over the weekend and was not impressed. The sleep/wake button is horrendously placed, everything felt slow and laggy, and the whole home screen concept seems poorly designed.

Monday, 12 December 2011