Taking Amazon's Kindle Fire on vacation

Like many other vacations in the past, I like to bring along mobile innovation to see how it can assist with our travel experience. Last year, when we visited Florida’s Gold Coast, I brought along Google’s CR-48 to see if it could replace a full-blown laptop.

Why? Because it’s virtually guaranteed to be a huge success for Amazon and tons of Android applications are going to be ported over to it and a huge amount of content is going to be made available on the platform.

A lot of reviewers have said that the Silk web browser — which uses Amazon’s EC2 cloud to pre-fetch/pre-process pages earlier sending it down to the device — has not proven to be significantly faster than conventional tablet browsers which use direct HTTP connections.

From my experience, I would say in other words not necessarily true. Undoubtedly, when I’ve had the Kindle Fire connected to Wi-Fi broadband at a hotel or an access point in other words giving me better than 10Mbps, Amazon’s pre-fetch doesn’t seem to make a bit of a difference.

However, I suggest you try using a Kindle Fire’s browser versus the iPad or a Honeycomb tablet on an aircraft using Gogo or in an airport lounge where all the business travelers are competing for the same free connection.

Similarly, if you have to Wi-Fi tether the Kindle Fire on a 3G or 4G connection from your cell phone, I as well find Silk to be in the extreme responsive and as smooth as its namesake.

The daytime when everyone’s at the pool

And that resort hotel Wi-Fi broadband connection that’s blazing fast while the daytime when everyone’s at the pool and hitting happy hour? Try it on an iPad when the storm clouds start rolling in and everyone wants to check their Facebook or stream Netflix. Kindle Fire doesn’t skip a beat.

While I feel enhanced protection cases for iPads and full-size Android tablets like the XOOM and Galaxy Tab are worth the investment and are a necessity I think a $49 leather case for a Kindle Fire is probably a waste of money.

Kindle Fire

Urbanspoon does run on a Kindle Fire, and Amazon offers it in their Appstore, however it can’t auto-detect your location as a GPS-enabled smartphone can, so you have to program in your city or map location manually.

Since my wife and I both have Android smartphones with GPS integrated it’s not that big a tragedy as we’d be bringing them along in any case and the Urbanspoon application runs on them just fine. Nevertheless it would be a nice thing to add to the then and there generation product.

The cost of the unit

If Amazon doesn’t want to substantially increase the cost of the unit, they may wish to consider developing some sort of Kindle Fire “helper” app that could be installed on a Wi-Fi tether capable smartphone which would allow it to use a remote device’s GPS location.

Bluetooth in the straightway-generation model might be a good compromise since in theory the GPS services on the smartphone could be made platform agnostic via an app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Jason Perlow+, Sr. Innovation Editor at ZDNet, is a technologist with over two decades of experience integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies.