Amazon dropped the anticipated and somewhat clamored for first update to its Fire. The bad news: it’s a bit of a pain in the arse to install. The good news: it’s completely worth it. The entire tablet feels energized.
When I reviewed it at launch, my main beef with the Kindle Fire was its occasional lag and choppiness — it was still a great machine, but one that was importantly short of the iPad’s smoothness. With the 6.2.1 OS update, that’s largely been fixed.
Pages turn faster. The main shelf menu is completely smooth and crisp to the touch. Super-graphically rich mags move around much more nimbly, and images pinch-and-zoom with far less hesitation — the same can be said for image-rich websites in the Silk browser. The update also killed my biggest UI complaint — not being able to delete something from your main carousel of media. Now, tap, hold, and remove.
That said, it’s not an iPad 2. It doesn’t have iOS’ touch grace. Maybe it never will. There’s touch delay when scrubbing through hundreds of pages in a dense magazine (annoying!), and zooming on large, pretty images isn’t flawless. But the Fire’s screen is now smooth beyond the point of reasonable complaint.