Bought the wife a Kindle Fire (pre-order) the day they went up for sale, 8 September 2011. It arrived yesterday.

I played with it a bit at night after work.

First big complaint: The Kindle Fire doesn’t get loud enough. I was watching Ip Man via Amazon Prime on it and I couldn’t get the volume high enough. Same was true watching a couple YouTube videos about RC helicopters, which are plenty loud enough on my MacBook Air and iPad 2. This is a big problem. I didn’t point it out to my wife.

Also, I really miss having a physical home button.

I also miss having physical volume buttons. How the hell do you change the volume while playing Angry Birds? (My wife was playing, I don’t find Angry Birds very interesting to play for more than about a minute a month.) This volume thing sucks.

Web browsing is okay. Even my wife remarked that page loads are disappointingly slow. I’d seen a video comparing iPad to Fire page loading yesterday and the Kindle loaded pages in 14 seconds that the iPad 2 loaded in 4, so I was prepared for slow page loads. Hopefully this is just a DNS thing and I’ll be able to change the Fire over to using Google DNS without screwing with any of the Silk browser’s cloud-based web browsing acceleration magic. We’ll see.

The list of huge (pretty) icons of the last-used apps and such is annoying in that you can’t delete items from first position — you have to push them down in the deck by running other apps. I opened the pre-installed Pulse app to see what it was. I don’t remember what it was now, the morning after, but I do remember that I wanted that stupid thing out of my face.

Address Book: What does this sync to? I want to sync my address book to my wife’s Google Contacts so they in sync with her Blackberry. How do I do this? Is this possible at all with the Kindle Fire?

What’s Good

The price. $200 makes up for a lot of disappointment.

The Kindle Fire’s size is nice for one-handed holding. Nice for watching a movie while holding our five week old daughter. I like that. Though I couldn’t hear the videos I wanted to watch, which was a shame.

28 November 2011 update: Fire still sucks. But wife wants to keep it, even though she agrees that it’s pretty bad.

The short version: If little helicopters interest you, buy one. They’re $20, come on.

Don’t buy the crap they sell at the mall — buy a Syma S107G. Don’t buy cheaper helis from other manufacturers. The best bang for your twenty bucks is a Syma S107.

My daughter, who is six years old, has crashlanded it in the pool, where it sunk to the bottom (and survived after I blew the water out with my compressor and let it dry overnight), stuck it on the roof where it sat for about ten hours and dropped it to the dirt from 25 feet in the air numerous times. Parts bill so far: $0.00. This thing is a tank, a submarine and a bit of a rocket. It’s not actually fast, but it hovers stably and is a joy to use.