adopter
How would you describe the build of the camera?
I was an early adopter of the original Kindle Fire in November 2011. I loved the Fire, but it was a bit clunky in some tasks, and it sadly lacked some desirable hardware features. I'm happy to say that I've had my Kindle Fire HD for a few hours, and my initial impressions are very positive. Clearly, Amazon listened to customers and addressed many of their comments. For starters:1. There's an external volume control. This was my single biggest gripe with the original Fire.2. There's a built-in microphone. That means you can Skype and use cool apps like Soundhound and Shazam. With the front-facing camera, you can do video Skyping, which is a big plus. The lack of a microphone or mic input was my second biggest gripe with the original Fire.3. An HDMI port means you can connect your Fire HD directly to most TV sets. I have a Roku, so that's not as big of a deal to me, but the HDMI puts the Fire HD out in front of almost every other tablet. I definitely want to try streaming Amazon instant video to a hotel TV the next time I travel.4. The video is noticeably crisper for videos.5. Bluetooth is a great new feature. It opens the possibility of wirelessly connecting the Fire HD to a myriad of products. I've been using a small, portable Bluetooth speaker to amplify my original Fire's sound. That works, but only with a cable connecting the Fire and the speaker. With the Fire HD, it only took a minute to activate the Bluetooth, find the speaker, and pair it with the Fire HD.6. The sound quality is very noticeably better. So far I haven't encountered an MP3 or video where I had to strain to hear, and oftentimes I'm having to back down on the volume.7. The web browser appears to be a little faster, although I won't really know how much faster until I upgrade my wireless router to a newer, dual band model. The wi-fi reception is quite good. When I connected the HD to our home network, the HD detected ten other networks in near-by houses, which is more than our laptop PC can detect.8. In the original Fire, using the graphic handles to select text was awkward and not always very responsive, especially with text in emails. The HD appears to have improved considerably the ease of selecting text.9. Unlike the original Fire, the memory is not partitioned, so it appears you can use all the user-available memory (12.63 GB) for anything - books, video, music, photos, etc. This is a big improvement.10. The virtual keyboard has been restored to something closer to the original Fire. Once again, there are separate periods and commas, so you don't have to hold down the period to type a comma. This was a real improvement.11. Text-to-Speech for books has returned to the HD. There aren't any settings - the voice is either on or off, and there's only a female voice - but it sounds more like a human voice and less like a computer than before.The HD was delivered already registered to me, so about all I had to do was connect with my wi-fi, set up my Gmail account (less than one minute) and set my favorites for the web browser, then download some of my books, magazines, videos, and apps from the Cloud. With 8GB of memory in the original Fire, I often had to delete apps before downloading any new apps. With 16GB in the Fire HD, that's much less critical.Because the size is different and the controls and ports have been moved around, cases for the original Kindle Fire won't work. The padded envelope sleeve that I had for the original Kindle Fire does work, although it's not a perfect fit.One annoyance: the Kindle Fire HD displays color advertisements on its lock screen, so every time you turn on the HD, you see advertisements for a Kindle e-book, a video, Amazon MP3 music, and such. Amazon has announced that owners can opt-out of the ads for $15. After using the HD for a few days, if the ads are too annoying, I may opt-out. Update: Apparently only the rotating lock screen ads can be removed by opting out. The targeted "suggestions" that show up when you're in the Amazon Store won't go away, so I don't know if it's worth $15 to opt-out. You'll have to decide that. You can do this at any time from your "Manage My Kindle" page.Invariably, the Kindle Fire HD is going to be compared to the Nexus 7, its closest competition in size, performance, and price. The HD weighs 13.9 oz. vs. 12 oz. for the Nexus (the original Fire weighed 14.6 oz.). That weight difference is at least partially offset by longer claimed battery life: 11 hours for the HD vs. 8 hours for the Nexus. Screen resolution is 1280x800 for both tablets (the original Fire's resolution was 1024x600). Most of the new features of the HD, like the front-facing camera and the microphone, are common to both tablets, but the HDMI port on the HD is a very nice feature that the Nexus can't match. I've used a Nexus 7, and it's a wonderful tablet, but based on my initial impressions, my slight favorite is the Kindle Fire HD, mainly for its ability to stream Amazon instant videos (which the Nexus can't, at least not without some finagling).Overall, the HD appears to be a worthy successor to the original Kindle Fire.-------------------------------------------Update (September 15, 2012):* At first, the layout of the various screens is somewhat different from the original Fire, but after playing around for a while, I'm getting used to it, and learning how everything works is pretty intuitive.* I'm reading on forums that some folks are having problems running some of the apps they had on the original Kindle Fire. For example, I'm having problems with MapQuest - it starts up, but crashes within a minute or so. It's probably just some glitches that will be fixed with the first OS upgrade.* The power button and volume control switch are flush with the case. It's not a big deal, but I wish they stuck out a millimeter or so to make it easier to feel them.* The original Fire was noticeably rectangular, so I used it mostly in the portrait position. The HD is more square, and it seems more natural to use it in the landscape position. 