The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The nigh disgruntled are packing the device up and fire it back to the retailer.
A few of their many complaints: there is no external book control. The exit switch is easy to striking by accident. Web pages accept a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or kid who picks it up will directly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is oft hesitant and sometimes downright balky.

All the individual grievances — entered on Amazon’s own Web site — received a mensuration of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not equally slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could exist peculiarly frustrating to manipulate.

“I feel the Fire is locomoting to exist a failure,” Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Vale consulting firm, enunciated in an interview. “I can’t recommend buying it.”

All this would exist adequate to ship some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe languish. Only equally a scope of retailers and tech firms could tell you, it would exist foolish to underestimate Amazon.

Amazon sees the Kindle occupation of devices as critical for its next equally a virtual store, and is willing to lose money on the sale of each one for the sake of market share. Formerly dominance is achieved, it plans to construct money on the movies, books and music that users download immediately from Amazon.

First, however, it needs to build the devices ubiquitous. Promoting them every day to its tens of millions of customers at the cheapest possible price will certainly help. If Apple took the notion of the tablet into the mainstream, Amazon is making it affordable.

The retailer says the Kindle Flaming is the nearly successful product it has ever introduced, a measurement of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold. It also says it is building eve more Fires to gather the stiff demand. But, at the same time, it acknowledges that it is working on improvements.

“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling away an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” pronounced Forced Herdener, a society spokesman.

There will exist improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will get the option of editing the listing of details that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were look at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.

Amazon declines to say, merely soon — believably in the spring — there will be an improved version of the device itself. One more shot is entirely the retailer will get, Mr. Nielsen said. “If that’s a failure, then the Flaming is doomed to the dust hatful of history.”

Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts experience been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.

Amazon’s devotion to this product business is such that it has stripped down the original Kindle e-reader, reduced its price and commenced to sell it through other retailers similar Best Buy and Wal-Mart for $79, equally well as prominently on its Web site. If Amazon received Apple-like margins, analysts estimate that the basic Kindle might price $180.

According to calculations by the enquiry house IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That essence does not include inquiry and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much equally $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy.