Jakob Nielsen

The Kindle Fire, Amazons heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer. A few of their 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. All the individual

Before anyone could buy a Kindle Fire, Amazon's tablet benefited from a certain degree of magical thinking. People--or at least tech pundits--were searching for the first irresistable non-iPad tablet. They wanted to see one that deserved to be a big hit. So many hit a mental fast-forward button and assumed that the Kindle Fire would be that tablet. Amazon's Kindle Fire. (Credit: Amazon.com) But the Fire's honeymoon ended the moment it hit the market. Many of the initial reviews weren't raves. And now the New York Times has published a story about the Fire by David Streitfeld that dares