Is the Kindle Fire the Amazon Edsel?

[Update: Kindle Fire rebuke is clearly in the ether. It appears that moments before I wrote this, Harry McCracken posted something similar, and moments after I wrote this, TechCrunch did likewise.]

Love that title. It's from a review in the Detroit Free Press, one of an increasing chorus of scathing reviews for the Kindle Fire:

Early buyers of Amazon's tablet-like e-reader, the Kindle Fire, are beginning to find what many had feared: it's not really a tablet computer at all.

These early adopters are running into an experience that is often clunky, a touchscreen that isn't super responsive, a Web browser that struggles on many websites and head-scratching hardware omissions. (There are no volume buttons.)

For Amazon, it's the product of impossibly high hopes for the device. When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Fire earlier this fall, the expectation was that it would be able to fully compete with the Apple iPad 2.

The Fire was supposed to finally buoy an Android tablet ecosystem that has languished under expensive, clunky hardware from manufacturers like Motorola.

It has not done that.

The $199 device also lacks privacy controls. It displays a carousel of all the most-recently touched content, even if you don't necessarily want that romance novel brought to the front with each read.

And while many had hoped to gift the inexpensive tablet to a teenager, doing so would also allow younger users to have one-click access to be able to make any purchases on the device.

This and every one of the negative reviews on the Kindle Fire are spot on. Worse, Amazon has *earned* this backlash. They hyped the Fire, big time, while fostering the very real sense that it was a iPad 2 competitor.

It is not.

That said, it's time once again for a reality check.

The fools and haters that claim Apple is all about the marketing simply have no idea what they are talking about. None. No one -- no other company in the world -- can build consumer electronics/computing devices of the design, build quality and cost that Apple can. Not even Amazon. Suggesting that iPad sales are great because of some Steve Jobs reality distortion field only reveals that reviewer's ignorance -- or deception.

Secondly, people need to not be so dumb. The Fire is a $200 device designed, primarily, as a platform for Amazon's eBooks, Amazon's music streaming, Amazon's video streaming, and very little else. But that's why it's only $200! Even with that, Amazon loses a few dollars per unit sold. Spend $200 on an Amazon ecosystem receiving unit and then complain it's not as good as an iPad and you got no one to blame but yourself.

Lastly, fear not. Amazon will get this right. No, this truthism does nothing to alleviate the suffering of existing Kindle Fire owners. Still, you should make no mistake. The Kindle Fire, as a product line, is not going away. Apple and Amazon may have very different strategies regarding where they make their money, but both companies do have one thing in common:

they make sure the ecosystem is rock-solid and then build supporting hardware for the ecosystem

Today's $200 Kindle Fire sucks. Next year's $200 Kindle Fire will be pretty damn good. 2013's $150 Kindle Fire will kick ass.