Kindle Fire draws heat from new Nook

There's a lot of heel-nipping in the tablet market these days.

Amazon.com just released the Kindle Fire, the most serious attempt yet to take on Apple's mighty iPad 2. Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble has shipped the Nook Tablet, which in turn takes aim at Amazon.

I've tried both new devices and my conclusion is that there's no clear winner. They're both compact, capable colour-screen media-consumption devices for budget-minded users who don't need all the features and functions of a full-blown tablet.

There's a lot to like about the Fire. I like the way Amazon has integrated its content services — books, magazines, videos, music. I like how it uses the Cloud, in this case, Amazon's remote servers, to store content and make it accessible when I want it, reducing the need for a lot of storage. (The Fire only holds eight gigabytes — same as the base model iPod touch.)

Most of all, I like the price: $199 (Dh730.9) in the US, less than half the cheapest iPad.

When I booted up the Fire, all my previous Amazon purchases appeared automatically and Amazon made it exceedingly easy for me to add more content. I bought a couple of books, some songs and a movie for a long aeroplane ride. All downloaded quickly and efficiently. There's also an Amazon site with some 8,500 Amazon- approved apps, far fewer than Apple has for the iPad, but still respectable.

Users of Amazon's $79-a-year Prime service get access to a library of thousands of TV shows and older movies, somewhat akin to Netflix's streaming service. The Fire comes with a one-month trial subscription.

So I like almost everything about the Kindle Fire — except, well, the device itself.

The Fire is plain, a chunky black rectangle with a 7-inch backlit colour screen. It's shorter than the Nook Tablet, a bit thicker and heavier. In action, it feels sluggish. There can be a noticeable lag when you're turning pages in an e-book or using an app. I also had trouble with the accelerometer, the sensor that changes the view from portrait to landscape when you turn the Fire. I sometimes found myself looking at an upside-down app for several moments until the Fire sorted things out. And my loaner fell short of Amazon's claimed eight hours of battery life.

Silk isn't smooth

Amazon claims that its web browser, Silk, has been optimised for speed, but in side-by-side comparisons I couldn't discern any advantage over the iPad's Safari browser. A few times the device told me it was connected to a Wi-Fi network while Silk claimed it wasn't. There's no 3G data service for the Kindle Fire, nor are there Bluetooth, a physical volume control, or a camera of any kind. The Fire runs Google's Android mobile-phone operating system. So does the $249 Nook Tablet, whose earlier version, the Nook Colour, remains on the market with a newly lowered $199 price tag.

The Nook Tablet, like the Fire, operates only over Wi-Fi and has no camera. In other ways, though, it is the reverse of the newest Kindle. Where the Fire is physically plain, the Nook is sleek and more visually appealing. The $50 price differential buys you not only twice the memory and twice the storage of the Fire, but also longer battery life and a slot for an SD expansion card.

Barnes & Noble's one-year head start in developing software really shows: scrolling is smoother, the screen reorients itself faster and the device just generally feels zippier.

Where B&N falls short is exactly where Amazon shines — in the variety of content available and how well it's integrated into the overall user experience.

Books aren't the problem. The Nook's selection is impressive and it has some nice flourishes. On-the-go parents, for instance, will appreciate not only the child-friendliness of the Nook Tablet but also a feature that lets them record a child's favourite story in their own voice.

— Bloomberg