KINDLE FIRE - VICTIM OF SMEAR JOB!

Remember the first two DIE HARD's?

The red-headed reporter who couldn't be bothered with silly things like facts?

Apparently the KINDLE FIRE has taken the place of Bruce Willis :

A widely circulated story in Sunday's New York Times questioned

whether or not Amazon's Kindle Fire would become, as the article's URL had it, "the Edsel of tablets."

Well, NEW YORK TIMES ... Yippie Ki Yay, Mo ... Ouch! Alice just kicked me.

Sorry. I get carried away when newspapers get carried away FROM THE FACTS.

The Kindle Fire is neither a bomb nor a failure precisely because there is no data -- as the article painfully demonstrates --

to suggest that either sales of the Kindle Fire have been disappointing or that Americans who have so far bought a Kindle Fire have, in fact,

regretted or been meaningfully frustrated with their purchase in significant or aberrational numbers.

From the Times:

A few of [users'] many complaints:
there is no external volume control.
The off switch is easy to hit by accident.
Web pages take a long time to load.
There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing.
The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.

Oh, you want to nit-pick TIMES?

Here are some complaints for the iPad 2, which almost everyone agrees is the best tablet on the market:

There are no HDMI, USB or SD Card slots.
It is impossible to view your content on a television screen unless you also buy an Apple TV or special cord.
The cameras are mediocre, as is battery life with iOS 5
(which is also plagued by an unimpressive Notifications Center).
Many users have complained about patchy Wi-Fi connectivity.
Also, the most disgruntled users are packing the device up
and firing it back to the retailer.

This from THE TIMES :
All this would be enough to send some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald's Arch Deluxe languish.

Really?
The Edsel sold a dismally low 84,000 models in its THREE YEARS on car lots in the late 1950s;

one estimate has Apple investing $1 billion in the Newton and recouping about $250 million in sales.

Meanwhile, the Kindle Fire is on track to sell between three and FIVE MILLION units in its first THREE MONTHS (per the Times, which would easily make it the second best-selling tablet of all time!!

Given that non-iPad tablet sales combined in the U.S. from January to October were 1.2 million).

So YIPPIE KI YAY that, Times!

One analyst even has projected that Amazon will sell six million Fires, which, as John Paczkowski of All Things Digital notes, would "surpass the iPad's domestic sales in its first December quarter in 2010!"


So why bring up the Arch Deluxe or the Apple Newton or the Edsel --

since none are apt comparisons -- if not just to smear the Kindle Fire by associating it with notable failures?

The modern Press saddens me. How about you?

{Many thanks to Jason Gilbert for the facts :

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-gilbert/kindle-fire-not-a-bust_b_1147438.html
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