This week, Amazon began pushing a software update to the Fire. The stated purpose of version 6.2.1 is to fix issues with the carousel, adjust the typing sensitivity, and to make the scrolling more fluid. These changes addressed complaints that had been around since the Fire's release. Yes, with the update you can now delete unwanted items from the carousel, which is fabulous. Yes, scrolling, typing, and stopping the carousel at the correct point have been improved. All good.
But, slightly buried in the update was something that surprised me as soon as I saw it. New to the Settings menu, under Device, it shows a more detailed breakdown of your storage space. Before, it would tell you that you had a certain amount of your full storage left without giving a breakdown of usage. You could glance and it and say, "Ok, I have 3 Gig of my 8 Gig of storage used.". NOW, though, the storage space has been divided into Application storage, and "Internal Storage" (for items like Books, Magazine, & Music). And Applications have been given only a little over 1 Gig of storage space. This meant that, in the one month period that I have had my Kindle Fire, I had already used up about 3/4 of my alloted Application storage space!
This is crushing to me. I like apps. A lot. I go into the App Store everyday, look at the FAOTD, and browse to see what's new. I knew when I bought the device that it had "only" about 8 Gig of space. (It's less than 8, of course, due to the OS software needs of the Fire, for instance.) I have an old 8 Gig iPhone 3G, and while it's been acceptable in terms of storage, I have vowed that I will get the larger 16 Gig iPhone when I upgrade. After using my iPhone for just under 2 years, I have about 2.5 Gig of apps stored on my phone. I do prune some apps off the phone occasionally, but I use a lot of the apps that are on there consistently & don't particularly want to delete more. The vast majority of storage on my iPhone is being used by apps and music. But when I compared the storage space of the Fire to my iPhone, I didn't expect the 8 Gig limit to be as big of a problem on the K-Fire because I knew I wouldn't be using it for music & podcast storage; for me, that's better suited to the smaller iPhone.
And this new storage development leads me to a question: wasn't the big selling point of the Fire supposed to be cloud storage? I knew that I didn't have to worry so much about the limited storage on the device because I could stream songs from the cloud, keep books I wasn't currently reading in storage on the cloud, and stream videos I've bought from Amazon from the Net, too. So, in my case, all I needed the majority of my storage space for was...apps. Yes, apps I don't use could be deleted from my Fire and re-installed later. But, as I mentioned when talking about my iPhone, apps are a big draw to me. And the new software update shows they are giving me a heck of a lot more room for videos & music than they are apps. Since, as I said, music and videos (which can take up a good portion of storage) can be used directly from the cloud and apps cannot, why does it make sense to devote more space on the device to those items that can be streamed? Perhaps a better question would be, why break down the storage into file type at all? Let THE USER decide how much they want to use for movies, pictures, music, and apps!
So, now my Fire is giving me less storage for my apps than my 3G iPhone, an outdated device from several years ago. How is this progress? I haven't really been able to think of a compelling reason why Amazon would need to divide their storage like this. In fact, when the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet was first announced, it touted 16 Gigs of on-board storage, plus it had an SD slot for more storage. Then the news hit that B & N had partitioned the device's storage space so that only 1 Gig was available for the user's non B & N purchases, and Fire users thought this gave them the edge. With this (new?) app partition on the Fire, anyone who was trying to use that particular argument against the Nook has had the playing field leveled., that's for sure
Well, one of my traits is adaptability. I can work around this new, annoying limit if need be. Just today, I got a warning message on the Fire that I was getting close to my storage limit and I needed to delete some apps. I've taken some off, and once Christmas is over, I can even free up some more room by putting A Charlie Brown Christmas back into storage. Still...I hope that, just like Amazon listened to the numerous complaints about the scrolling problems and the carousel, they'll get an earful about this new storage limit. If not, I suppose Amazon will need to adapt, too, because by necessity I'll be spending less money in their App Store. (shrug)
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