Amazon Kindle Fire: A good choice for gaming or not?

Amazon.com’s first pure slate on the lines of current tablet culture, Kindle Fire has been impressive in many regards, especially in price and reading. A dual-core machine within a diminutive price cap of $200 is a bargain nobody wants to miss.

However, a tablet should bring more to the table besides reading, for example, gaming. The current line of slates in the market not only offers a gaming platform but are in direct competition with consoles like PlayStation 3 and X-Box 360.

There are five prerequisites to a tablet suitable for gaming: faster CPU, efficient GPU, G-sensor, an accelerometer and a gyro-sensor. Although the Fire has these features albeit last the last one, the gaming on a Fire has some limited attraction to it.

Aside from the absence of a gyro-sensor that can detect the displacement of a tablet on x-axis, the availability of advanced games is hindering the popularity of the Fire among gaming enthusiasts.

The Kindle tablet has a dual core Tegra 2 CPU clocked at 1 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. The internal memory is sufficient for games like Angry Birds (and its expansions), Cut the Rope, Where’s My Water? and so on.

The resolution at 1024×600 pixels is quite impressive on a 7-inch screen but still a 10-inch version is expected this year for bigger screen to occupy the graphics of 3D games.

The only advanced polygonal 3D game seen in the catalogue on Amazon-curated Appstore for Android-based Kindle was Riptide GP. The racing game worked good in terms of graphics, lack of stutter and frames-per-second rate but since the tablet lacks a gyro-sensor,
the handling was quite difficult.

Moreover, the accelerometer in the Fire was not so efficient as compared to its counterparts in the market.

Surprisingly, Shadowgun—one of the most advanced 3D games of 2011—was absent on the Appstore. It was disappointing not to find any game of that genre as the Fire is more than capable of playing polygonal games.

The Fire also does not support three-finger swiping gesture in games like Fruit Ninja. This gesture results in no swipe at all on Amazon’s flagship tablet. On the other hand, iPad 2 and other Android tablets support such gesture.

Bottom-line

The gaming enthusiasts expect three things in the 2012 version—not yet officially announced: A quad-core processor, a gyroscope and more interactive gesture support.

The quad-core processor is not expensive and by the time 2012 version hits the shelves, it will be cheaper to keep Kindle Fire within a reasonable budget. Until then, iPad 2 wins the bet and remains the reigning champion in gaming.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Dec 12 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry