As I said yesterday, my daily routine these days concludes with a couple of hours of viewing time, all of which happens in bed, on my five year-old, 8" Kindle Fire. Having used the device for half a decade, I'm still in two minds over whether or not I'd recommend it. It very much depends on what you'd want to use it for, which I suppose applies to most things, but seems particularly foregrounded here.
The negatives became apparent fairly early on and have only gotten worse. You're at least theoretically locked into Amazon's ecosystem although one of the first things I did after I set the tablet up was to go online and research how to sideload Google Play. That gets you access to the whole of the wider Android marketplace but it doesn't do you a lot of good when most of the stuff you're interested in comes up as "Not available for your device".
The Kindle Fire is definitely not designed for playing games. It wasn't great at it when I bought it and half a decade later it won't run anything new that I want to try. That's how I ended up installing Bluestacks and re-installing Nox the other day, although as I said at the time, neither of those will run the one game I wanted to play, either.
They will run pretty much everything else the Kindle Fire won't, though, and there's a third option I meant to mention but forgot, that being Google's own proto-PC-platform, Google Play Games. As the official description puts it
"Google Play Games on PC brings the best of Google Play by enabling players to experience an immersive and seamless cross-platform gameplay."
The service is still in beta but a couple of weeks back Google rolled it out to 120 countries so it's pretty widely available. At some point I'll probably give it a fair run and post about how I find it but my initial impression is that it's slick and professional as you'd expect but with a limited choice of games as yet.
It looks as though Google are trying to ensure the games on the service are playable natively using PC controls. There's some of this built into the service itself with key-mapping and games are categorised as either "compatible" or "optimized", depending on how much work the developer has done to port their titles across to PC.
A quick check of what's available right now yields somewhat disappointing results. Genshin Impact is there, although why you'd need to use the mobile version on PC when there's an actual PC edition is hard to imagine. On the other hand, Honkai Star Rail, is not, so maybe the reverse logic also applies, an argument made neither more nor less convincing by the presence on Google Play Games of HSR's sister title, the oddly-named Honkai Impact 3rd which, although I'd never heard of it until now, is apparently also available on Steam.
Neither Black Desert Mobile nor Dragon Nest (Any version.) are included, unfortunately, and neither is Sky: Children of Light, the game I installed the service hoping to be able to play. For now, there seems to be no real reason to prefer Google Play Games over the established independent alternatives but I have no doubt that will soon change, provided whoever's sponsoring this one at Google doesn't lose interest and wander off.
Returning to the supposed topic, my Kindle Fire, I would also be hesitant to say anything very good about its Amazonian operating system. Derived from Android but heavily modified, FireOS is functional but limited. It chugs along, occasionally halting and requiring a reboot to get it going again. I'd blame that on the age of my Fire but that wouldn't be a convincing excuse; it's always done it.
As for web-browsing, I wouldn't say "forget it" but I would say "bring a book". I tend to use my Kindle within a few feet of the router with a five-bar signal strength rated "Excellent" by the Fire itself and yet it takes what seems like forever to load a new web page. Actually it's seconds but a second is forever in computer time.
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Not a real Mondrian. |
A minor but exceptionally irritating aspect of FireOs is its bull-headed refusal even to consider delivering notifications. As far as I can tell after extensive research it's literally impossible to get a Kindle Fire to cough up the code from a Google Notification, making certain apps entirely inaccessible to me if I'm foolish enough to try and use a Google account to log in. I don't actually approve of the Notification process to begin with but as with many things in life, you'd rather be able to have it and not use it than be denied entirely.
So much for the things the Kindle Fire does badly or not at all. Obviously it would have gone to the back of the cupboard under the stairs long ago if it didn't also have some powerful positives. Really, one positive: the display.
The Fire is designed as a media device by which Amazon really mean a screen on which to watch things you've bought from Amazon. As the name implies, it can act as a Kindle for reading text, a job it performs very well, if not quite as well as an old school Kindle with one of those screens that apes paper. Or so I assume. I've never used one.
Where the Kindle Fire really shines, though, is in video. The display is significantly better than my monitor and far better than my (Admittedly crappy.) television. Even though mine is a five year-old, basic model, the image is intensely crisp and sharp. I'm not sure my eyes are capable of interpreting better.
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I didn't ask for a fox. |
started was how immersive it could be, even when the image was much smaller than those I was used to. The such first device I ever used was an MP4 player, the make and model of which I can no longer remember. It had a screen about two inches square, so small you'd have imagined it would be all but useless for anything more than reading the liner notes on an album, yet I was able to download TV shows and watch them at work in my lunch break with as much enjoyment as if I was sitting in front of my TV screen at home.
Later, I watched some of the same shows again on a much larger screen and was fascinated by the detail I'd missed but the more surprising discovery was that the lack of that extra visual information didn't seem to have reduced my pleasure or understanding to any meaningful degree. I'm of the opinion the imagination readily fills in the absent detail without the viewer even realising there's anything missing.
Fascinating as that process may be, it's irrelevant to the Kindle Fire. In fact, my experience suggests its rather the reverse. When I move between watching the same shows on my PC monitor and the Kindle Fire, it's the image on the smaller screen that feels more distinct. I prefer it and not just because when I'm watching the Fire I'm usually lying down - although that certainly doesn't hurt.
There's a lot of information available online about the optimal screen size to viewing distance ratio. The Fire display has clearly been optimized for viewing at a comfortable arm's length. If you have average-length arms, I guess. It feels natural, comfortable and immersive. I find it easier to get lost in the image with the Kindle Fire than with just about any other screen I've watched, large or small.
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Now I did. |
The two final positives I have to share about the Kindle Fire are also the two main reasons I bought it in the first place. Kindles are very cheap and very reliable.
Prior to buying mine, I'd been through something like seven or eight tablets in four or five years. Either I broke them or they broke themselves. Some of them were objectively superior in some respects to the Kindle and most I'd been quite happy with while they lasted but I was fed up of paying good money for devices that barely limped past the manufacturer's minimum guarantee before falling over.
That my Fire, which cost me less than half the price of most of my previous tablets, is still working as well after five years as it did five minutes out of the box is enough to make me feel charitable towards its many flaws. That and the fact it does the one thing I really want it to do pretty much perfectly means there's every chance that, when it finally does expire I'll most likely buy another.
As I implied at the beginning, I wouldn't exactly recommend the thing but then I wouldn't try to dissuade anyone from buying one, either. For me, it has one job to do and it does it well, so I guess it gets a passing grade.
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