latest
Imagine your perfect full-sized tablet. It's light, thin, has a gorgeous high-resolution display, multiple-day battery life, powerful speakers, and a cutting-edge processor. The Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 is all these things and more. From a hardware and engineering standpoint, it is truly a marvel. And, for a certain class of buyer, it may very well be that "perfect" full-sized tablet.When I reviewed the Fire HD (7") last year, I came to a similar conclusion - I was wowed by the hardware (perhaps excepting the processor, which was a laggardly dual-core TI OMAP), but the software made it difficult to recommend for enthusiasts like you and me. Unfortunately, the story is largely the same this year, except Amazon's Fire OS feels all the more limited, I think, because the Fire HDX 8.9 really is such a great device.Multitasking is archaic even by iOS standards. Amazon's home-brewed browser, Silk, is still painfully bad. User customization options remain stripped down to the bare essentials - you can't even change the wallpaper in Fire OS. Much of this is by design. Amazon wants a tablet that's easy for almost anyone to pick up and use, regardless of age or technical experience. It does not want users to get lost in a seemingly endless array of menus and settings, rather, Fire OS is all about putting content front and center, and guiding you into Amazon's various content-distributing properties.That's not to say Fire OS is a complete failure in the functional sense, though. Quite the contrary - Fire OS is easy to navigate, runs very smoothly on that Snapdragon 800 processor, and I personally find the layout to be a welcome departure from Android, iOS, or Windows. It's not the most beautiful interface ever designed, but it feels bespoke to the Fire in a way that even the heavier UI layers from the likes of Samsung and LG can't approach. Once you get used to the way things are done in Amazon's world, some of it even starts to make a lot of sense.