[Moogs]

Just bought one today (for publishing purposes mostly). My initial thoughts:

1. Packaging / unboxing experience - very reliable / smooth.
2. Smaller than I thought it would be, slightly heavier too.
3. Screen flipping is a little slow to react to orientation changes.
4. Very nice UI, similar to iBooks shelf for multiple categories.
5. No 3G blows (I forgot about this, as all other Kindles have it but the reason this one doesn't is obvious... Amazon is not going to foot the bill for everyone's 3G web browsing, moving and song downloads, etc. It's one thing to have free text-based book downloads (low bandwidth per user), another thing to have free streaming of web content, etc.
6. Keyboard feels tiny compared to iPad but compared to smart phones it's probably a step up.
7. So far nice resolution/color/image quality

8. It's unlikely where the features overlap, that I will prefer this to iPad based on what I'm seeing but it might be a close 2nd.

More soon...

[Moogs]

Further observations:

The buying experience for Kindle Books is a little wonky. You do it through the regular Amazon store but you have to be careful that you specify in the filtering menu that you only want Kindle books and only more recent ones, otherwise you end up putting stuff in your cart that won't work.

The speed of the purchase-then-download aspect is pretty snappy because if you have any kind of video media or audio media going on, they force authors not to embed it; it's all via browser. You store the videos online and link to them then use the back button from the UI to jump out of the browser and back to your book page. This is good for download speeds but crap compared to iPad for the actual experience of reading and enjoying a video with the book content (extra steps, app required).

No ability to rate or review Kindle versions directly from the Kindle books UI, except to go back to Amazon.com on the browser and go through the usual number of clicks in the browser to write your own review. Kind of stupid IMO but maybe because the keyboard UI is small compared to iPad they don't expect people to use it for that purpose.

Pinch and zoom capabilities work pretty much like iPad and the scaling quality can be good if the author uses the right size images.

Buying and downloading Android apps is pretty easy. I did a few freebies and it works well enough.

Overall though I still like the iPad experience better and even though the Fire is smaller it feels just as heavy in your hands as an iPad.

[Maciej]

I recommend we merge this with the other Kindle Fire thread in third party products.

[Moogs]

I didn't know there was one / didn't see it upon scanning. If mods want to merge it that's OK with me.