A while ago I gave my thoughts about the Kindle Fire. Now that I’ve used it for a while it time to talk about where I think Amazon needs to go (in software) to take the Fire to the next level (for more thoughts about how to improve the Fire, check out Jason Snell’s article on Tech Hive).

1. Better integration with Cloud Drive – Amazon does some really good things in terms of integrating the music, books, and magazines that you’ve purchased with your account. However, the piece that is missing is the syncing of documents that you would store on your Amazon Cloud Drive. An example of this is me. I’m now attending the University of Phoenix to get my MBA. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing for school. The reading is mostly from pdf files. I would be really happy if I could store these on my could drive and then get to them when I need. Using the send to Kindle app is nice but it seems to be an extra step that isn’t really needed. Maybe what I would really like is for the Cloud Drive to be more like dropbox.
2. Playing nicely with Google Play – Neither Amazon or Google want to admit it, but the Fire is a device running Android. Amazon does a good job of creating a “walled garden” for apps. However there are times that you need an app that can only be downloaded from Google Play. The app that springs to mind right away is the native Facebook app. You can download it from Google Play but you can’t get it on Amazon’s Android Store. The other half of this equation is that Google Play won’t recognize the Fire as an android device. Amazon already allows you in install apps that aren’t on the Amazon Android Store so why is there an impasse?
3. Folders – Remember how excited we all were when iOS finally had the ability to put apps into folders? Well, it’s about time that Amazon give us this functionality. While their carousel is very handy for getting to recently used apps, books, magazines, or media getting to an application you haven’t used it a while is difficult. Additionally, if you have a lot of applications in your “apps” section, you could be scrolling for a while to get to the app you are looking for.

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