The Kindle Fire is admittedly older and uses an older, rewritten (read "crippled") version of the Android OS. Which is fine if you are giving the Fire to a non-tech savy person, as they will probably not know the difference with their use of the Fire.
The thing is, the Fire is heavier than the Nexus 7 - noticeably heavier and thicker. So for reading in bed, the Nexus 7 wins out.
Reading PDFs on the tablets? The Nexus 7 is smoother while scrolling through the pages and seems to load them quicker, especially on the larger PDFs we gamers know and love.
Gaming on it? Only game I've tried on both is Angry Birds Space. It looks sharper on the Nexus 7.
Movies is where the Fire may actually overtake the Nexus 7, and not because of picture quality, which should be sharper on the Nexus. The Kindle Fire allows you to access your Amazon Prime free videos collection. If that is going to be one of your main uses for your tablet, the Fire does something that the Nexus 7 does not.
Ease of use? The Kindle Fire doesn't have buttons for volume control, it's all on screen. I much prefer physical buttons for such, so point to the Nexus 7 for providing such.
Bluetooth? The fire lacks bluetooth. The Nexus 7 synched promptly with the bluetooth keyboard I got with my HP TouchPad (back when HP killed the TP and released it at rockbottom prices). If you ever want to use your tablet for extensive emailing or blogging, you need a keyboard. The onscreen keyboard is not sufficient.
Price? $199 for the Fire. $199 for the 8GB Nexus 7.
Except for accessing the Amazon Prime Video Library, the Nexus 7 beats the Kindle Fire hands down. The Nexus is much more bang for your buck, and I'm enjoying reading the RuneQuest 6 rulebook on it in bed ;)
Thanks for this review. Have you tried watching NetFlix on both?
ReplyDeleteThat's what we use, but we don't have either the Fire or Nexus.
We have the NookColor. Not bad for reading but sucky for watching stuff.
Cheers and boogie boogie.
I just watched part of the included transformers 3 on the nexus - looks damn good (the quality, not the movie - that francise is over done)
ReplyDeleteonly watched one movie on the fire - the postman - looked fine.
i will netflix the same movie on each and give further feedback at a later point ;)
Thanks Erik, that would be cool. We've been thinking about upgrading.
ReplyDeleteHave a groovy weekend :-)
So it works well for reading RPG PDFs? Do you zoom and pan or do you view a full pages?
ReplyDeleteSounds cool.
ReplyDeleteAs a tech-junkie I love all sorts of new toys. I enjoy my Xoom, but this looks like a lower-cost, but just as feature rich alternate.