Kindle Fire并非划时代的革命性产品，但它确实是亚马逊公司（Amazon）有史以来最重要的产品。

    亚马逊积17年之功，终于推出了Kindle Fire这款产品，填补了亚马逊公司庞大发展版图上缺失的一环。1994年，首席执行官杰夫•贝索斯首次在车库里创建商店，成为公司发展的雏形。此后，公司推出了各种服务，但它们互不相干、缺乏协调。Kindle Fire的问世终于将这些服务融为一体。Fire能阅读电子书，在线购物，还能下载电影和音乐。它采用的是一款依托于云的网络浏览器浏览网络。并且，它的定位忠于其制造者敏锐的零售嗅觉，售价要比其最大的竞争对手，苹果公司（Apple）的iPad，要便宜至少300美元。

    最大的疑问在于，它的优势体现在哪儿？

    Fire的机身模仿了黑莓（Blackberry）的PlayBook平板电脑，只不过做工更精致。它机身更窄，按键更少，边框也更窄。这也绝非巧合：这两款产品是由同一家公司生产的。Fire不会赢得像iPad 2那么高的回头率，但拿在手上也不会显得掉价。它像是一件晚礼服，裁剪精致又风格低调，无意于表现自己是如何时髦炫目。

    和以往的Kindle一样，Fire也差不多是一本较薄的中等尺寸的平装书大小。它比巴诺书店（Barnes & Noble's）的Nook Color更轻盈，长时间握持也不会感到疲劳。它拥有一块防刮擦的7英寸彩色屏幕，机身后部的漆层触感柔软、犹如橡胶。机身的顶部是两个小型扬声器，音量大小足以观赏电影（前提是离得够近）。

    机身内部拥有一颗双核的1G处理器，512MB缓存，足以实现流畅自如的运行。Fire还自带8G储存空间，可用来存储书籍、电影、文档和软件。亚马逊公司称，WiFi关闭状态下，电池可用8小时；一直看电影的话，电池可用7.5小时，这听起来还算不错。如果打开WiFi，那就得多充几次电了：根据我的经验，如果运行日常各种任务，如浏览网页、观赏电影及阅读电子书，那就得每隔6.5小时充一次电。这种表现还算不错。但是，iPad在WiFi打开的情况下待机时间是10小时，Nook平板电脑则宣称WiFi关闭下，它的待机时间长达11.5小时，与这两者相比，Fire就处于下风了。

    The Kindle Fire isn't a revolutionary device, but it is Amazon's most important product ever.

    The culmination of 17 years of work, the Kindle Fire is the missing piece of the company's vast corporate puzzle, bringing into harmony nearly every discordant service the company has built since CEO Jeff Bezos first set up shop in his garage in 1994. The Fire reads e-books, shops online, downloads movies and music. It surfs the Web with a cloud-based web browser. And, true to its maker's sharp-nosed retail roots, it undercuts its biggest competitor, the Apple (AAPL) iPad, by at least $300.

    The big question is, is it any good?

    The Fire's case resembles the BlackBerry (RIM) PlayBook tablet, only more refined. It's less wide, has fewer buttons and a thinner bezel. That isn't a coincidence: they're made by the same company. Amazon's (AMZN) Fire won't turn as many heads as the iPad 2, but you won't be ashamed to bandy it about either. The Fire is like a tuxedo, finely tailored even if it doesn't announce itself as something flamboyant.

    Like Kindles past, the Fire is roughly the size of a thin, medium-sized paperback. Lighter than Barnes & Noble's (BN) Nook Color, it's easy to hold the Fire for long periods of time without getting tired. A scratch-resistant 7-inch color display takes up the front, while the back is covered in a soft-touch paint that feels almost like rubber. Up top, two small speakers produce solid volume for watching movies (at close range).

    Inside, a dual-core 1GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM keep performance snappy. The Fire also comes with 8 GB of built-in storage for books, movies, documents and apps. The company says you'll get 8 hours of battery life in between charges with WiFi off and 7.5 hours of battery life of straight movie-viewing, which sounds about right. With WiFi on, expect to plug the Fire in more frequently: in my experience, a mix of daily activities like web browsing, movie watching and reading meant recharging every 6.5 hours. That's acceptable, but not exceptional when compared to the iPad 2's 10 hours with WiFi on or the Nook Tablet's touted 11.5 hours with WiFi off.

    软件方面，亚马逊为Fire选用了谷歌（Google）的Android操作系统（其内核代号为“姜饼”）并创建了以灰色和橙色为主的全新用户界面。主屏幕设计得像一个书架，屏幕上有四大板块：一条纤细的状态和通告栏，用以显示电池状态或后台运行的程序；一个横栏，按照媒体类型分门别类地展示书籍、视频和软件；一个虚拟的“旋转木马”式封面浏览器，可供点击浏览近期看过的媒体；一块特定区域，可供用户做书签标记。

    一般情况下，在Fire上的阅读体验与基于电子墨水的最新款Kindle同样流畅，但是新型处理器使运行速度要更快些。但是由于它采用了彩色屏幕，因此和iPad，Nook Color及其他平板电脑一样，在室外阅读可能就会颇为困难。另一方面，照片和其他图形也可弹出展现。用它来读像《时尚先生》（Esquire）这类以图片为主的期刊时赏心悦目，同时要标出一些生词或做些批注也来得更快捷。阅读漫画书时，我确实注意到翻屏有点迟滞，但在读其他内容时就没有碰到这种问题。

    Fire的一大引人入胜之处是能从亚马逊公司内部和第三方服务商处获得大量精选视频。亚马逊将Fire上的视频分成三大类：尊享即时视频，电影和电视节目。亚马逊用户可以很方便地找到或搜索内容，随后就能向亚马逊租用或购买了。虽然能在Fire上租借高清视频，但它本身只支持标清视频播放。因此，如果要租高清版的《X战警：第一季》（X-Men: First Class），它只能在其他兼容的设备上播放，在Fire上则只能观赏标清版。亚马逊应用程序商店（Amazon Appstore）即将推出成千上万种第三方应用程序，流订阅（Hulu Plus）及流畅播放的网飞公司（Netflix）视频软件也在其中。

    亚马逊的Silk网络浏览器也已获得广泛关注，因为它与其他网络浏览器的工作原理不同：有些网页上载是由亚马逊的EC 2云服务完成的，有些则由Fire自身来完成。数据会为了这款平板电脑而进行优化处理，因此正像公司所解释的，一幅3MB的图像可能被压缩成50K的文件。游湖浏览特定网站时，Silk还会分析其他用户浏览这些网站的一般规律，并根据这些行为特征，设法预测当前用户下一步将点击什么，并预先载入相关内容。

    For its software, Amazon took a version of Google's (GOOG) Android operating system (for the hardcore, codenamed "Gingerbread") and built a new user interface dominated by grays and orange. Designed to look like a book shelf, the home screen displays a thin status and notifications bar to display battery life or messages from apps running in the background, a row that categorizes items by media type like books, videos and apps, a virtual Cover Flow-like "carousel" of recently-browsed media to swipe through, and an area where users can bookmark things.

    The reading experience is usually as fluid as the latest crop of e-ink-based Kindle devices, but things hum along a little faster thanks to that processor. But just like the iPad, Nook Color, and other tablets, you may have trouble reading outdoors thanks to the device's color screen. On the other hand, photos and other art pop. Reading a photo-friendly periodical like Esquire is a pleasure, and little things like highlighting words for definitions or making notes are much faster. I did notice some lag swiping between comic books panels, though I didn't run into that problem when reading other media.

    One of the Fire's draws is a decent video selection from in-house and third-party services. Amazon breaks up the video section on the Fire into three main categories -- Prime Instant Videos, Movies and TV Shows. The company makes the experience easy to stumble upon or search something out, then either rent or purchase it. Though you can rent HD content on it, the Fire only supports standard definition video. So if you rent X-Men: First Class in high definition, it'll play in HD on other compatible devices, but in standard definition on the Fire. Hulu Plus, and a smooth-running version of Netflix, will also be among the thousands of third-party apps available at launch from the Amazon Appstore.

    Amazon's Silk has received a lot of coverage because it works differently from some other web browsers: some of the work of loading web pages is done by Amazon's EC2 cloud service, and some is handled by the Fire itself. Data is optimized for the tablet, so as the company explains, a 3-megabyte image may be crunched into a 50-kilobyte file. Silk also analyzes how other users typically navigate a particular web site you're visiting and based on the behavior, tries to predict what you'll click on next and pre-load it.

    这种创意并不新鲜，但亚马逊似乎将其性能提高了一个新的档次。在实际操作中，基于网站上Flash的多寡（Flash越多，载入时间越长），页面载入得相对还要快些。由于iPad 2上的苹果移动iOS操作系统不支持Flash，因此很难将Fire这方面的应用性能与在iPad 2上的相应应用直接进行对比。但是，我做了一个完全谈不上科学的实验来一探究竟：把这两台平板电脑并排放在一起，随后同时打开同一个不带Flash的网站。结果，Silk载入某些页面的速度要稍快些，不过这种差别可谓微不足道。

    换言之，其他性能领先的平板电脑能做的，Kindle Fire几乎样样精通。并且它还有一些它们所没有的绝活：每位Fire的新用户都能获得一个月免费的亚马逊尊享礼包，体验一下公司所提供的各种服务。礼包包括：为期两天的货运服务，免费的流媒体电影，以及试用最近推出的Kindle用户借阅图书馆服务。借阅服务允许用户每次借一本书，每个月借阅一次。

    Fire比此前任何一款Kindle都要更进一步，它是亚马逊独有的生态系统的接入装置，这个系统中亚马逊提供的服务几乎应有尽有。这个接入装置常常会不那么含蓄，而总是开门见山。比如，当用户要买一本电子书时，亚马逊就会提醒你，这本书你是否可以借阅。如果你喜欢某个视频，公司又会提示， “尊享会员可以完全免费观看”尊享即时视频，但对其他人来说，就需要按需点播了。没有尊享会员身份，也能用Fire。但是这种信息的含义是毫不含糊的：如果你不是会员，就错失了大好机会。

    Kindle Fire拥有亚马逊广受欢迎的各项服务，同时通过性能可靠的硬件呈现在用户面前。它的界面响应迅速、易于上手。它没有iPad那种精致靓丽的感觉，但是凭借亚马逊的品牌、亚马逊手中多元服务所构成的庞大生态系统，再加上199美元的价位，它其实也并不需要这种感觉。在这个意义上，苹果的平板电脑算是第一次真正棋逢对手。

    译者：清远

    The idea itself isn't new, but Amazon seems to have taken it up a notch. In practice, pages loaded relatively quickly depending on how much Flash a site features. (The more Flash on the site, the longer the load time.) It's hard to draw a direct comparison to say, usage on the iPad 2 since Apple's mobile iOS operating system doesn't support Flash, but in a completely unscientific experiment, I put the two tablets side-by-side and loaded the same Flash-free sites on both simultaneously. Silk loaded some pages a hair quicker, but the difference was negligible.

    In other words, the Kindle Fire does nearly everything other leading tablets do. It also has something they don't. Each new Fire owner receives one free month of Amazon Prime, a taste of the company's service which offers two-day shipping, free movie streaming and access to the recently-introduced Kindle Owners Lending Library that lets users borrow one book at a time, once a month.

    More than any other Kindle before it, the Fire is an initiation into an ecosystem where nearly every service is provided by Amazon. Often a not-so-subtle initiation. When you're shopping for an e-book, Amazon notes if the title is available to be lent to you. If you're jonesing for a video, the company points out that its Prime Instant Videos are "$0.00 for Prime members," while they're a la carte for everyone else. The Fire can be used without a Prime membership. But the message is clear: you're missing out if you're not a member.

    The Kindle Fire takes Amazon's wildly popular services and presents them in a solid piece of hardware with a responsive, easy-to-understand interface that works. It doesn't have the iPad's extra layer of polish and sheen, but with the Amazon brand, a wide ecosystem of services at its disposal, and that $199 price point, it doesn't really need it. In that sense, Apple's tablet just met its first real competitor.