Consumers are starting to lose themselves in unecessary features. Do you really need any of this to use the Kindle Fire for what it was meant for -- a cheap portable book/game/movie viewer?
To each his own, but I bought the new Kindle for this reason. I own a Kindle Keyboard, but it was just too much -- I just wanted a barebones reader. Even the touch, IMO, is overkill -- who really needs to "touch" what is supposed to be a book? So I picked up the $79 Kindle and was very happy. It's really thin, great aesthetics, and has all the barebone features I need to do one job really well.
if people are buying it as a cheap portable book/game/movie player, then yeah those features are unnecessary. but from everything i've heard, the primary thing driving returns on android tablets so far isn't that people dislike it, it's that people expect more than it is. some overeager salesperson or fanboy tells people that an android tablet can replace your computer, people get annoyed that it's just a tablet.
if amazon is successfully managing expectations for this product, it has plenty of features. if the fanboys get out of control and oversell it, then it is sorely lacking.
One of the reasons people "expect more than it is" is that it's hard for an average consumer to get an Android tablet to do anything out of the box.
A Kindle Fire, by contrast, puts media front and center right away, and will surely make the store as easily accessible as it is on the e-ink Kindles. It's a Kindle, so right off the bat, you can read books. You get a free trial of Prime, so right off the bat, you can watch video.
Presumably they will make it easy to understand the process for getting your music into the Amazon cloud (or copied on to the device), and I'm sure it won't be too hard to go get hooked up with a copy of Angry Birds, or whatever other games and starter apps they're pushing. And as long as Amazon has a credit card on file for you (pretty likely if you're buying an Amazon tablet), purchasing whatever it is you want will be ridiculously simple, just like on the Kindle.
It should be a fairly batteries-included experience for the vast majority of users right out of the box.
To each his own, but I bought the new Kindle for this reason. I own a Kindle Keyboard, but it was just too much -- I just wanted a barebones reader. Even the touch, IMO, is overkill -- who really needs to "touch" what is supposed to be a book? So I picked up the $79 Kindle and was very happy. It's really thin, great aesthetics, and has all the barebone features I need to do one job really well.