Keyboard & User Experience - Amazon Kindle Fire Review

Keyboard & User Experience

The keyboard looks and acts like a mildly reskinned version of the default keyboard included in Gingerbread. The two biggest differences are that the keys are square, and the keypress sound comes from Honeycomb. As such, it works pretty well - you're not going to type out essays on it, but the ergonomics are good and the visual style is cleaner and more consistent than the Gingerbread keyboard.

I come away from the Kindle Fire feeling pretty pleased with how Amazon has gone about crafting the user experience. It's genuinely sleek, with a simpler and more elegant interface than Android. It's less capable, less customizable, and less intricate than any build of Android I've used before, but also more polished and more user friendly. It's pretty limiting, so some of the power users I've spoken to are relatively disappointed, but for a device targeted at mainstream-level consumers, this is one of the best implementations of an Android-based OS I've seen. It's more distanced from Android than the Nook Tablet OS; you have to dig pretty hard to find the really direct ties, but every single piece of the UX is different in some way. 

It just feels more complete than the stock version of Android, a more cohesive and consistent user interface throughout the entirety of the operating system. It's significantly more polished from a visual standpoint, but you do get the feeling that it's not fully baked yet. There's a general sluggishness though the UI, as well as some odd pauses and stutters during complex animations. Examples being page turns in books and magazines, and the overall choppiness of the carousel. There's also an issue where screen taps will not always register or delay in registering, resulting in a double tap that will either act as one or two taps.

The OS isn't as fluid or as smooth as it should be, but given the kind of hardware on board, it's likely something that can be resolved in future software builds. As we've seen time and time again however, although UI smoothness is something that can be resolved, it's not always something that ends up being actually resolved.

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