While out and about today, I stopped at a Staples on the chance they’d have a Kindle Fire to check out. Somewhat to my pleasant surprise, they did have the Fire there to play with.
But even more to my disappointment was that the unit was a demo. No, not just a demo unit, a demo period. The only interaction with it was through some kind of flash application that simulated their UI that I’ve been reading about. But I couldn’t launch browse or really try anything else. What’s more, I couldn’t figure out a way to break out of the app to just get to the raw Fire functionality.
A salesperson came over and I asked him if it was possible. He verified that it was not and when I replied that was extremely lame, he agreed. He’d even tried to figure out how to shut down the app so that people could actually use the device, like the other tablets they had on sale there. But to no avail.
I left at that point, since there was no way I’d purchase a Fire without the ability to actually exercise it. Perhaps I’m just being persnickety. But it struck as extremely poor marketing on Amazon’s part.