The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s color touchscreen tablet, is flying off the virtual shelves, the company says. Its price tag is $200 — and that’s all many consumers think they need to know.

But when I reviewed the Fire a few weeks ago, I wasn’t what you’d call a raving fan. True, it has no camera, microphone, GPS function, Bluetooth, memory-card slot, or built-in calendar or note pad. But the real problem was the responsiveness. As I wrote:

“Most problematic, though, the Fire doesn’t have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or ‘wait’ indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.”

In other words, the original Fire was inexpensive but balky.

It wasn’t much of a stretch to predict, though, that Amazon would eventually fix the software glitches. “Amazon tends to keep chipping away at the clunkiness of its 1.0 creations until it sculptures a hit,” I wrote.

And sure enough. Tuesday evening, Amazon released a free software update for the Kindle Fire that, if you ask me, should be called the Polish Update (that’s “polish” as in car wax, not Warsaw). Its primary purpose is to fix all of those jerky, balky, miscalculated-momentum issues. The update will be automatically delivered to your Kindle Fire.

Sure enough: the home screen “carousel,” a rotating shelf that holds all of your books, magazines and movies, now stops on a dime when you want it to. It takes only one tap to open something instead of several frustrating ones. When you do tap something, it opens faster and more fluidly. Page turns are smoother, especially in magazines.

There are a couple of tiny new features, too; for example, now you can choose which things you want on that carousel; you just hold your finger down on a thumbnail and choose Hide Item from the shortcut menu.

There are still some things Amazon should fix. For example, magazine reading is still an exercise in frustration; far too often, the row of page-navigation thumbnails still thrusts itself on top of what you’re trying to read. Other problems may not be so simple to fix: for example, the on/off switch is on the bottom edge, where the Kindle’s weight naturally falls when you’re reading.

It turns off by itself a lot.

Still, today’s software update erases the stubbornness that characterized the original Fire software.

Now, if you’re in the market for a tablet, the Fire isn’t the only game in town. Barnes Noble’s Nook Tablet ($250) has charms of its own (like much sharper Netflix movie playback), and of course the iPad costs a lot more ($500) but also does a lot more and shows a lot more on its bigger screen.

But if you’re already a happy member of Amazon’s ecosystem — music store, bookstore, movie store — then the Kindle Fire may now be calling your name more loudly than ever. Today’s touch-ups make an enormous difference.

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