The Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7 has just been released and obvious comparisons to the Apple iPad have to be made. Today, we check out both of these tablets and put them head to head in a series of e-reading tests. You can get a sense on how newspapers, magazines, comic books and eBooks function on both devices.
The Apple iPad Mini may give you a bit more screen real estate with its 7.9 inch screen than the 7 inch one on the HDX. The resolution and processing power are fairly mighty with Amazon’s new product and it really shows with heavy graphical content such as Comics and Magazines. The one advantage the iPad Mini has is when you read magazines, you get a boarder to boarder view of each issue, which you are reading it. Amazon has a large black rectangle at the bottom of the screen where the soft buttons are, this gives you less screen real estate.
In our video review we pit iBooks against the stock Amazon Reader to look at how they both handle eBooks. The advantage really swings to Amazon with their deep ecosystem and a slew of extra features. X-Ray, WhisperSync for Voice, Immersion Reading, Quiet Time and extended reading augmentation tools put it firmly in the lead.
We next check out USA Today on the iPad Mini and Kindle HDX. Both apps are very different in appearance and we give you the scoop on what to expect. Marvel Comics is up next, as we show the same comic on both devices head to head. Finally, we look at the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine and see how both devices handle large files with tons of color and images.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.