Unboxing the Amazon Kindle Fire

You have to love a box with a sense of humor. The Amazon Kindle Fire comes in that box, with a nod to Amazon's signature brown-cardboard packaging and a splash of color. The Kindle Fire packaging is also impressively eco-friendly, using what appears to be unbleached cardboard wherever possible and relatively little extra space in the box.

Keeping things low cost, the Kindle Fire doesn't come with many accessories—not even a paper manual, just a little cardboard "getting started" card. Inside the box there's a tablet, the card, a standard MicroUSB power adapter, and ... that's it. This is a cloud-based device, and all of the goodies you load onto it will come from the cloud. (A case, on the other hand, will clearly be extra.)

The Kindle Fire runs a customized version of Android on a dual-core, 1-GHz TI OMAP4 processor. So, yes, it's fast. It's primarily designed to read books, play music, and show video, and it hooks closely into Amazon's ecosystem, with your Cloud Drive music, Amazon video and apps from the Amazon Appstore appearing automatically on the device.

Its major competitor is the as-yet-unlaunched Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, which adds an SD card slot and more memory, but costs $50 more and doesn't have quite as seamless an ecosystem as the Kindle Fire does. We'll have a full review of that tablet soon. For now, here's a feature/spec comparison.

Take a look at the Kindle Fire unboxing slideshow to check out what you'll get for your $199. For a deeper dive, check out our Kindle Fire review.

About Our Expert

Sascha Segan

Former Lead Analyst, Mobile

My Experience

I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also wrote a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsessed about phones and networks.

My Areas of Expertise

US and Canadian mobile networks
Mobile phones released in the US
iPads, Android tablets, and ebook readers
Mobile hotspots
Big data features such as Fastest Mobile Networks and Best Work-From-Home Cities

The Technology I Use

Being cross-platform is critical for someone in my position. In the US, the mobile world is split pretty cleanly between iOS and Android. So I think it's really important to have Apple, Android and Windows devices all in my daily orbit.

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 for work and a 2021 Apple MacBook Pro for personal use. My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, although I'm probably going to move to an Android foldable. Most of my writing is either in Microsoft OneNote or a free notepad app called Notepad++. Number crunching, which I do often for those big data stories, is via Microsoft Excel, DataGrip for MySQL, and Tableau.

In terms of apps and cloud services, I use both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive heavily, although I also have iCloud because of the three Macs and three iPads in our house. I subscribe to way too many streaming services.

My primary tablet is a 12.9-inch, 2020-model Apple iPad Pro. When I want to read a book, I've got a 2018-model flat-front Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. My home smart speakers run Google Home, and I watch a TCL Roku TV. And Verizon Fios keeps me connected at home.

My first computer was an Atari 800 and my first cell phone was a Qualcomm Thin Phone. I still have very fond feelings about both of them.

Read the latest from Sascha Segan

Read full bio