[7" Kindle Fire HD General] needabottle:
Full disclosure here. I have had every version of the iPad to date and love version 3. BUT.. it is just a bit too big so I've been looking for something a bit smaller for quite a while. I've bought and sold a number of 7 or 8 inch tablets, Samsung, Pandigital, Ainol to name a few and ended up selling them on. The Pandigital was the most fun. I just hung on to the coat-tails of the smart boys who hacked the hell out of it and made it more than what it was. When the Nexus 7 was released it looked like I had a new best friend but there was nowhere to try the darn thing so I held off. When good old Jeff announced the Fire HD I was intrigued and when there was one on display at Best Buy I fondled it and bought one.

The one thing I really like about the iPad is the aspect ratio of 4:3. Everything has gone to 16:9 and I detest the bloody ratio. I purposely stayed away from them both at home and work and have Dell 16:10 ultrabrights and love them. I have gone from T-Mobile S2 to Note and refuse to look at the S3 or Note 2 because the screens have become longer and thinner. Don't even get me started on the iPhone 5 :silly: I seldom watch movies on a small screen or monitor and with the iPad it is apps like Zite or magazines or comics and it excels at that.

OK, now before you start saying that the screen on the Fire HD and Nexus 7 are the same.... yes I agree. Same aspect ratio but not quite same colour saturation etc, but where the Fire HD beats the Nexus 7 for me is that the Nexus 7 looks and feels far longer and thinner. In reality it is only a smidgen longer but the decrease of width makes it feel like a sausage. I don't have massive hands and to be honest I don't find there to be much difference holding either the Nexus 7 or the Fire HD.

Initially, the closed wall and adverts of the Fire HD were off-putting rather than annoying, but after rooting, which ultimately needed installing the SDK to get my computer to be able to ADB into it, and now there is a hack to remove adverts, the device has grown on me. I was able to install the Play Store and pull down apps like Bloomberg, Aldiko, Currents, MX Player and Skype. I couldn't get Zite but I pulled it from my phone and sideloaded it. I installed Gmail and set up my personal and office mails. The one thing I couldn't get to work was QQ Launcher. ADW launcher works but I find myself using it less and less as I just go to the Apps tab.

Now I can easily watch videos or read ePub files with no problem. I have pretty much most of the things I have on my iPad and I find the size and weight of the Fire HD to be very comfortable.

There was definitely an extra smoothness with the Nexus 7 but was it a "holy mackrel, that just blew my eyelids off".....? Nope. The Fire HD works and works fast enough. The only real slowness, if you could call it that, is a slight hesitancy in scrolling PDFs which have been zoomed. The screen is definitely better than the nexus 7, and if it was possible to get QQ Launcher to run then for me the darn thing would be perfect.

The Nexus 7 was a nice unit. Fast and hackable to the cows came home but the long and thin of it ultimately killed it for me. Also one thing I noticed was that with Zite for example, the Nexus 7 rendered it slightly different to the Fire HD. Text was smaller and not quite so clear. There was also something that may have been a bit dodgy about the Nexus 7 and it was very reluctant to switch on at times. I had to plug it into a power source and then it fired up. The battery was almost fully charged but sometimes it just refused to wake up.

So there you have it, one guys absolutely, purely subjective, non scientific rational as to why the Nexus 7 went back this morning and the Fire HD is still here. Your mileage may differ.