22.02.12
Those of you who pre-ordered or made the trek to Best Buy and slapped down 200 bucks are likely pretty familiar with your Kindle Fire by now. Although it comes with rather decent specs for the price, the Kindle Fire is far from your average tablet. With a new and proprietary carousel interface from Amazon, the lack of Android Market and missing features like Bluetooth or GPS it's somewhere between an eReader and tablet. One thing is certain, though. It was built solely for media consumption – consumption of Amazon's services.
To summarize, without Android Market and being on Android 2.3, the Fire has its limitations . For instance, any applications that you side-load, even if tablet-optimized, will not display as tablet apps . Instead, they will appear exactly as they would on your phone, just much larger. And even though you can easily install APKs that you have laying around, a lot of the ones you've grown familiar with on your Android phone will not work on the Fire. More specifically, if you take any Google app APK you have and try to install it, the install will process just fine. But once you load it, instead of asking you to login, the process will simply fail because Google account setup isn't nested in the software like your run-of-the-mill Android device.
Source: PhoneDog (blog)
