Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought the original Kindle Fire when it came out several years ago. With the number of improvements that have been released since then, I have always contemplated buying an updated one, but ultimately thought, "Well, this one is still working perfectly, I see no reason to change." The original Fire had some issues for me, but none of them were terribly serious. Considering that it has lasted me four years without a case, and that I have not been terribly careful with it (put it in pants pockets, backpacks, dropped on the floor...), speaks a lot for the quality of its construction. The new Kindle Fire feels cheap. Rather than the solid feel of the first generation, it feels easily breakable. The home screen is extremely cluttered with icons I will never use, but cannot remove, only relocate. One of the things I used my Fire for the most was listening to music; being connected with Amazon made it convenient to download albums I had purchased, and listen to them at work without WiFi. The new Fire has made that more difficult, because the Music icon on the home screen takes you to the store, not the library. You can access the library from the tab list on the home screen, but unlike the first generation with the tab set at the top (Newsstand - Books - Music - Video - Docs - Apps - Web), the new tablet has essentially the same bar, but now requires you to scroll through to find the thing you want, and introduces some new selections (splitting Apps and Games, and adding Shop and Audiobooks tabs), mostly because they chose a much larger font size. One of the most attractive features was the option to expand the internal storage with an SD card. As my old Fire was constantly at capacity, and I was constantly trying to decide which albums to delete to download a new purchase, I was excited for an extra 64 Gb of space. Unfortunately, while you can have videos and apps downloaded/installed onto the SD card, this has no effect on music downloads; they still go into internal storage until it is full, and then the Fire disables WiFi until you have cleaned it up. Even with ES File Explorer, I could not move the files onto the SD card, requiring it to be connected to my desktop to manually move files from my computer to the SD card (which the Kindle can then play perfectly fine, making me wonder why it was so difficult to begin with). The layout of the Music library has also changed in such a way as to make it less user-friendly, and now you cannot add a song to "Now Playing", a very useful feature when tapping a song plays every song after it on whatever screen you are viewing. For the price, it's hard to complain. But in almost every regard, I have found the new Kindle Fire to be less user-friendly and more cluttered than the original, and have yet to see any real improvements beyond the addition of the SD slot, which itself is poorly used by the device. Update: Now Amazon has apparently decided to randomly send notifications. Shop Amazon for Holiday Deals! Listen to a holiday playlist on Amazon Music! Great.