With excellent 7" tablets like the Nexus 7 out in the wild, I have a hard time seeing why someone will buy a crippled, less featured, less responsive, slower device with god-awful usability.
And if buying a dud upsets you, why buy fancy new gadgets on launch day in the first place? Just wait a week or two for the reviews to come in. That's just common sense.
My issue with the Kindle Fire is that the "dud-ness" of the device seems willfully negligent as opposed to merely missing the mark.
It's like buying a video game that just didn't turn out to be very fun, vs. a video game that's no-fun and crashes every 5 minutes. One is disappointing, the other is infuriating in its unprofessionalism and lack of respect for their own product.
It also took quite a long time for most apps you'd care about to release iPad-compatible updates, by which time the iPad 2 was out and was lighter, smaller, and much faster.
The browsing experience was particularly painful on iPad 1 - loading things took a long time, and the new, bigger screen practically begged for multi-tab browsing, except there's not enough RAM to hold even two tabs at once, so switching tabs was just constant reloads. Lots of little things that aren't huge problems by themselves, but contributed to not using the device.
Let's suppose 30% of all products are duds (i.e. you wouldn't buy them after playing with them for 10 minutes or reading a few reviews about them). So when you buy a product a launch day you pay a premium for getting your hands on it 2 weeks early. The kindle fire was a $199 device, I think, so you're then paying a $60 premium for having it a week or two early. Whether you want to take on that risk is entirely up to you. I personally wouldn't take on the risk, because I know myself well enough to predict I'll feel disproportionately bad when I waste money on a gadget I don't use. It looks like you're the same way. Most people aren't suited to gambling like this.
So you have to take a look at all the anticipated consequences of buying early. And the sour taste of ending up with a dud is part of that. By blaming Amazon for a lousy product you lose sight of the more important conclusion: that this outcome was completely predictable and avoidable.
I've experienced some problems with connectivity and the browser freezing occasionally but that's it. A hard reboot every once in awhile seems to solve both.
What makes the other tablets so much better? I haven't used them so I have no point of reference.
The iPad 1 worked very well for my use cases (main one was an instant-on, reliable web browser). At the time, no other device offered me that capability. And I tried many options. For this use case, the original iPad is fine. I have yet to upgrade to the iPad 2/3 (my wife has the latest one and she uses it for web browsing and games).
The thing about the Kindle Fire is that I now don't trust Amazon enough to buy a product from them on launch day. This is a big deal because I have (used to have?) very high regard for Amazon. They broke my trust.
Apple still retains that trust btw. They mess up badly too (iTunes is a train wreck) but have a better batting average. Google does not (I got burned with the Nexus One and Google TV).
Because the Kindle launch day was years ago and it had matured into a solid, capable product. Amazon appears to have taken working code and deliberately broken it on purpose. Their engineering management seems to have lost the ability to even reverse engineer their own existing products.
Are you talking about them crippling e-ink Kindles? Because if so, you are blatantly wrong - the newer versions are faster, crisper, lighter, better in just about every regard.
If you are talking about the Kindle Fire, then there is probably little to no overlap in the software running between them.
The same thing is true for organizing books into collections. This was a solved problem. Even if Amazon could not reuse the GUI code, they had the existing collections GUI as a functional specification of what needed to be done. But no, instead my Fire gives me a giant pile of hundreds of unsearchable, unorganized e-books.
Or what about the synchronization feature? It lets you synchronize your notes, highlights, and last page read across all your Kindles. Amazon had solved this problem. They had working code that at the very least could have been used as a cheat sheet fore the Fire. But no, they managed to break that too.
The techmical execution of the Fire is the second most bot hed software product I have ever experienced, the worst being a video game from the 90s that I picked up remaindered for $2.
I had mine as a hackathon prize and if I had to buy one I'd buy a Nexus 7, but heck, when I got mine there were no $199 tablets as good as the Kindle Fire.
With the existence of the Nexus 7, which is just about completely superior to the Fire, there really isn't a reason to get the Fire. Let's hope the Fire 2 ups the game some.
May be they'll do a better job this time. They are surely aware of newer/better competition.