I've had a Kindle Fire for several weeks now.  In addition to being a soft southerner and an effete intellectual, I'm also a spoiled Apple user - so naturally I hate it.

It's clumsy, heavy, ugly, awkward.  The power button's in the wrong place, so I use it upside down - and a lot of apps don't deal with that, so I have to turn it round again. There are no other buttons - no volume control, none of the standard Android hardware buttons - so controls float on and off screen. The touchscreen is unresponsive.  It doesn't know how to do scrolling properly. The interface is ugly. The browser is slow and hard to use.  The device drops WiFi as soon as I take my eyes off it.  I don't even enjoy reading books on it.

(Watching video is fine though - but preferably streaming video, because there's not a lot of storage in there.)

Some of this is software, and will get better as Amazon pushes updates out. Some of it is software, and probably won't get better, because I don't think Amazon really care enough (and because Apple have the patent on scrolling with bounceback!).  A lot is hardware - there's a slow processor in there, and not much RAM - and might never get better - unless Amazon decide it's worth losing a little more still per device and put some more muscle into Fire v2, expected in Spring 2012.

The UR-Kindle and its descendants were not only a good price, they were... pretty good.  OK, so they were kinda ugly; and those paging buttons didn't work for everyone; but it was clear a lot of thought had gone into the Kindles, and they really did deliver on the promise: think of a book and start reading it a minute later; high contrast non-flicker e-ink screen; very long battery life; and a working ecosystem. They sold by the shed load (err, we think; because Amazon never tells) for good reason.  Just as the iPad defined, and many would say created, a category that had actually been populated for many years, so did the Kindle finally deliver the e-book reader, half a dozen years after Rocket, Sony et al thought they had done so.  The Fire's not like that: it feels like a shabbily executed me-too product.

So, I hate the Kindle Fire.  And I'm not the only one: there have been anecdotal reports of quite a lot of returns - but of course we'll never know.  Amazon is a publicly quoted company, but manages to get away with revealing astonishingly little information.

But I might be prepared to love it.  Because for all its faults, there's a good chance are that it will sell like wild... you know.

For starters, there's the price.  There's a line that you shouldn't expect to enjoy the Kindle, because after all you're not really paying for it - Amazon are sharing the cost with you, because this it's a gateway for you to buy a great deal more Amazon content.  In Stephen Levy's excellent phrase: "you’re not buying a gadget — you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia". Amazon are knocking out the Fire at two hundred bucks, versus five hundred for the cheapest iPad.  There's an awful lot of people for whom the iPad was just too much money, who'll feel that the Kindle is just right.  And obviously Amazon will be promoting this thing like crazy, and they have access to an awful lot of eyeballs.  And it's not just the price: aiming off for this being a version 1 product, if you are a proud and patriotic subject  of Amazonia - if you typically buy your movies and music as well as books from Amazon - this is an attractive way to consume at least the first two of those, because of the integration with Amazon's cloud.  (If they glued an e-ink display to the back, it could pull off all three.)

And if Amazon succeed in distributing a ton of Kindle Fires (analysts have estimated around five million by the end of 2011, but that's just guessing) then they just might create a viable alternative platform to iOS for selling apps.

And I'd love that.

Cogapp have been making iOS apps for a couple of years now (most notably for our friends at Dorling Kindersley).  Infuriating though Apple can be, they give us a very straightforward platform to work on.  By contrast Android is a jungle of variations of devices and OS versions, a nightmare to test on, with unclear routes to market.  We've been playing with prototypes on the Fire, and they look fine (when we make allowances for the processor speed).  If Amazon can distribute enough of these devices, then targeting the Kindle Fire explicitly, instead of the nebulous 'Android tablet'; and the Amazon Appstore (instead of a hundred routes to market) could reach a substantial new audience for our work and our clients' content.

So I'm hoping that Jeff Bezos has a very happy christmas.  And the same to you.