The Kindle Fire HDX boots into Amazon’s own version of Android. You would be hard pressed to fi nd many traces of Android within the UI, such is Amazon’s complete overhaul of how the system works. The home screen features a large Recent Items widget, built around your Amazon content purchases, along with a selection of your favourite apps. Along the top are tabs that enable you to quickly navigate to your games, apps, books, music, videos and so on. The content stores are built directly into the UI, as is cloud support. So you open the Movies, for example, and can see your local content, cloud-stored content and tap the Store icon to buy some new stuff. Needless to say, all your activity is tied to your Amazon account, just as other devices are tied to Google.
The notifi cations pane from Android remains in place, as well as a few more obscure features, but for the most part this is an Amazon tablet. The replacement apps are pretty good; the keyboard works well, the Silk web browser is faster than Chrome. We just can’t say it does things better than Android. It’s a great content consumption device, if you’re a heavy Amazon user.
