Apparently my wife and I didn't get our Kindle Fire pre orders in early enough for shipment to happen on the first day. We finally got notification late yesterday afternoon that our Fires are on the way and should arrive today. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on one and getting a better feel for the pros and cons of the platform.
Reviews so far have generally been positive for the Kindle Fire. At worst people have tended to say "Well, its imperfect but its so cheap that is OK." Given the price, Amazon is clearly getting cut a lot of slack for less than perfect performance. That's not something that Apple generally benefits from. There aren't a lot of downsides to being a premium brand, but this is one.
None of the issues I've seen mentioned sound like show stoppers. Performance seems to be the biggest gripe. One big advantage Apple has over Android tablets in general is that they only have two platforms to optimize for. This explains in large part why Apple's iPad's provide a better experience with less memory. Hopefully over time Amazon will be willing and able to do a better job of optimizing Android for their fire platform. Doing so would give them an additional leg up on other Android tablets and shouldn't be prohibitively expensive.
At this point its probably fair to consider the early going of the Kindle Fire as an unqualified success for Amazon. The interesting question is where will they go next? My guess is a larger form factor tablet with a screen a bit smaller than the iPad's 10.1 inches to avoid direct competition with Apple both on the supply side and in the market place.
The next couple of days are going to be really busy for me but I'm hoping to have an initial review and thoughts fairly soon.
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