My first kindle fire, back in November, lived for about two hours. Then I updated it to software version 6.1 and it was forever after frozen at the startup logo screen. Amazon kindly sent me a second fire that survived the update, which I had been using more or less happily for the past month. More happily because I can view pretty pictures and movies with it, less happily because the interface was super slow and unresponsive. About a million reviewers have said much the same.

Today, that second kindle fire apparently tried to update itself to version 6.2. Tried and failed, or as some people like to say, tried and died. Same symptoms as the first go round, frozen at the startup logo. Supposedly, this was the update that fixed the UI response issues, but I’ll never know. This time it’s going back for a return, no replacement. Maybe I’ll try again in a year, but if I need to get a new device every time there’s a software update I’ll pass.