A non-political post by a pissed off consumer. If you’re looking for politics, move on to the next post.
I’ve had a second generation Amazon Kindle for 3 years now. I love it. The screen is sharp and crisp and easy to read in bright sunlight. It’s light and has a little keyboard. But it was quite limited in what it could do. So when Amazon announced the Fire, I was excited. Here was a device that was closer to an iPad than a Kindle but came in at under $200. How awesome is that? I’m already all-in with Amazon for music and movies so this seemed like a perfect fit.
The device arrived yesterday. It took 3 minutes to get it setup on my home WiFi network and I was reading books, watching movies and listening to music right away. Unreal! I was very, very pleased with the device.
Then I took it to work… And the catastrophic heroic flaw manifested itself. The EPIC FAIL that was lurking just below the surface.
The Kindle Fire does not support proxy servers
Got that? Can you hear me? Let me repeat that for those of you who were startled like a deer in the headlights and perhaps did not believe what you just read.
The Kindle Fire does not support proxy servers!!
I could not believe it. I couldn’t have missed something, could I? I checked all through the Google search results and yes indeed, the Kindle Fire does not support proxy servers by design. This was a major WTF moment for me.
In a discussion thread on Amazon’s own site, they say this:
How is this possible? It’s 2011! Every company on the planet has proxy servers. This is absurd! How can they not support proxy servers????
All I can say is I’m glad I didn’t throw away the box the Fire came in. I’m gonna need it.
Hello, Apple? I need an iPad… STAT!
Well — not exactly “by design” — more like “by default”. It’s built on top of Android 2.3. Android didn’t support proxy servers till 3.0 (or ICS on cell phones). So probably it will support proxys some day, but not till they actually upgrade it.
Fact is, for their target market it’s probably not a big concern to Amazon – I can’t really think that a whole lot of people will be using these puppies at work –
Heck I can’t currently use my very expensive and fancy cell phone behind an explicit proxy either.
You’re not making me feel better… I may keep it anyway, but I’m freakin’ frustrated. 🙁
I know this is an old thread, but proxy support is offered in Gingerbread. My Droid x2 On 2.3.4 can access a proxy server, so if a Kindle is on 2.3.3, it should be able to do the same thing.
How awful! How horrible!! How absolutely unacceptable!!!
I just have two questions.
What is a Kindle?
And.
What is a proxy server?
LOL.
A proxy server is a semi-retired sherriff who brings your divorce papers or requests to appear in court…in these situations kindle is what your brain does until the smoke starts to come out of your ears. LOL!
They may not have a target audience who wants to use them at work but many universities have the same kind of setup.
Actually, Android didn’t support proxy configurations until version 2.2 (Froyo). Since Fire is based on 2.3, it should support proxy servers.
My guess is they disabled it for some reason.
They’ve released the source code recently so i guess is just a matter of time until there’s a solution for this (a non official solution), but it’s anoying anyway.
they disabled it, most likely, because they’re content agreements don’t allow streaming movies and music outside of the US. Proxies would be a way to get around that.