So the Kindle Fire I've been complaining about to anyone who'll listen just got an over-the-air update, and I've been poking at it for the past two days instead of doing actual work. Figured I'd write down what actually changed, because most of what I saw floating around forums this week is either "OMG FIXED" or "still garbage," and neither one is quite right.
Quick recap for anyone who wasn't subjected to my rants in person: I bought the Fire the week it came out, $199, mostly because I wanted a cheap tablet for reading in bed and figured Amazon couldn't screw up a $199 device too badly. The two big complaints since launch have been (1) the whole interface feels laggy, especially that carousel thing on the home screen, and (2) the Silk browser is slow and occasionally just sits there thinking about life while a page half-loads.
The update installed itself automatically overnight, which I appreciate, because I don't want to be the guy manually sideloading update.zip files onto a tablet I bought specifically because I didn't want to fuss with it. Woke up, it had already rebooted itself once. No prompt, no "hey do you want this," just done. Fine by me.
Does it fix the lag?
Some of it, yeah. The home screen carousel — the thing that shows your recently used books, apps, and websites as a horizontal scroll of covers — used to stutter every time you swiped it, like it was rendering each cover fresh instead of caching anything. That's noticeably smoother now. Not iPad smooth, let's not get carried away, but I'm not gritting my teeth every time I flick through it anymore.
App switching is still kind of sluggish though. Going from the Kindle store back to a book I was reading takes a beat longer than it should, like the whole thing pauses to think before it commits. Maybe a second, second and a half. Doesn't sound like much typing it out but when you're doing it forty times a day it adds up to a genuinely annoying tablet experience.
The browser
Silk is... better? I want to be careful here because "better" is doing some work. Pages load faster on average, I'd guess maybe 20-30% based purely on stopwatch-in-my-head testing, nothing scientific. But it still chokes on anything image-heavy. I loaded up a few sites I check daily and the ones with lots of photos (image-heavy blogs, basically) still had that thing where text renders first and then images pop in one at a time like it's 2003 and I'm on dial-up. Scrolling while a page is still loading is still rough.
Also, and this bugged me before the update and still bugs me now: there's no way to just turn off the "cloud acceleration" thing Silk does. I get why Amazon built it that way. Routing traffic through their servers lets them do prefetching and compression, but I'd like the option to browse without Amazon's servers being in the loop on every page I visit, especially with all the Carrier IQ stuff blowing up this month. Not saying Amazon is doing anything shady with it. Just saying I'd like the toggle to exist.
One genuinely nice thing: the update added parental controls, which I don't need, but my sister does since her kid keeps getting into the Kindle store and "buying" things. She'll be relieved.
Is it worth it now?
If you were on the fence about the Fire because of the reviews saying it felt unfinished at launch, this update moves the needle, but only partway. It feels like a device that's being actively worked on rather than one that shipped and got abandoned, which honestly counts for something at this price point. I still wouldn't call it a competitor to the iPad in any real sense, and I don't think Amazon is even trying to make that argument. It's a $199 tablet for buying stuff from Amazon and reading books, and it does that job better this week than it did two weeks ago.
Still keeping my old Kindle Keyboard around for actual reading outdoors though. The Fire's screen is useless in direct sunlight, glossy as anything, and no software update is going to fix that one.