Additionaly, Amazon has released the source code for the Fire. Be interesting to see what the modder community is able to do with it.
Picked up my Kindle Fire this morning. So far, so good. I took it to the nearest McPuke's (free wifi) and registered it. Downloaded a bunch of apps just in case there were problems when I returned to Canada. ...And now that I'm back in Canada, the Amazon Appstore won't work and I can't stream any audio/video from Amazon. Fuckers. Good thing I regularly travel to the States for work. Oh, I'm also pissed that yesterday, Blackberry dropped the price of its 16GB Playbook to $199.
One thing passing off the wife is the inability to categorize your books. She has a few hundred books and having to go through everything is bothersome. Plus see doesn't want her pr0n out there for all to see
Blame it on Apple and Coverflow. Such things look pretty, but make it damned hard to find things when you need them.
The way I get around this is to not DL everything I have. I only keep a few dozen books on my Kindle (old school) with the rest just staying up on Amazon's servers. I believe you at least have an Android phone? It's pretty easy to crack them so you can establish your own wireless hotspot through your cell WITHOUT having to pay Verizon (or whoever you have) for the privilege of moving the data you bought to another device. That way if you don't have Wi-fi you can still quickly access your cloud library.
Doesn't matter if you DL the book or not. The carousel displays everything, unless you know of a setting that allows what you are doing. Yeah I'd got a DX (waiting on the goddamned Galaxy Nexus) and we've been discussing root. There are some 1 touch roots available. Ultimately it's up to her. Oh one other things that is bugging her is the lack of bluetooth connectivity. Having an external keyboard to connect to it is something she really wants. At this point she is talking about foisting the Fire on me and going for an iPad, Xoom, or Samsung.
There's a bluetooth capable chip in the Fire, so someone could figure out how to enable it. Has she played with any of the Android tablets? A lot of the reviews have been lukewarm, at best. The Honeycomb UI (which ICS is supposed to keep with few modifications) is pretty, but doesn't seem as convenient as pre-Honeycomb UIs, IMO. You might want to poke around and line up some good ROMs for a tablet, before you plunk down the money to buy one, so if she decides she doesn't like the stock one, you're all set to slap another one on there. And I don't know what the deal is with Samsung tablets, but every time I've looked at one in the stores, somebody has completely fubar'd the damned thing. Barely able to respond to inputs, crashy, just awful. I know that somebody's got to be screwing them up after they get to the store, because there's no way they could be shipping them like that. I mention this because if your wife is the kind of person who manages to get high tech devices all screwed up with just a few moments of use, and doesn't know what they did wrong, you'll want to really familiarize yourself with the device so you can get it back to sorts quickly.
Yeah I don't know, I've only got a regular Kindle. I have to say that for $199 there's not much anyone can really complain about, it does appear that the rumors are true that Amazon rushed to get this out for Xmas. Hopefully the gamble works. While some of the problems are a result of cost cutting to get to the price point, it appears a good amount are UI issues and Silk that hopefully will get fixed. And quickly.
Duh. I forgot I had a US-bank issued credit card. For whatever reason that seems to solve the problem of the Appstore. I've been playing Where's My Water nonstop since yesterday!
Has the big update that is supposed to fix a lot of the software problems come out yet? If so, how much of an improvement was it?
Well it pissed her off enough that she returned it the other day and bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8 last night.
Have not received any notification of an update yet but I haven't had any problems whatsoever other than the fact that I'm in Canada and some services are blocked. (But there are ways around that.) EDIT: Just did some googling and found that a software update was released today. Sounds like you're in deep crap if you rooted your Fire because the new software version reroots it and then prevents this sort of thing. I don't forsee the need for me to root my device so I'm not particularly chuffed about it. What pissed your wife off? I'm extremely happy with the Amazon Fire. My buddy has an iPad2, which certainly has more bells and whistles but I find the Fire more to my liking -- definitely more portable and PC-friendly. The Splashtop App (available for both Apple and PC) just makes any tablet all the more powerful. My only complaint so far about the Fire would be the 8GB storage space.
Well for starters there was the above post I made It was the absolute lack of privacy and in ability to put books, videos, etc into various collections and folders. That was a critical issue for her.
Yeah, if I understood it correctly that is one of the big things to be addressed in the update. As well as touchscreen and Silk stuff.
So far, I'm leaning toward the Nook Simple Touch. If I'm going to get a tablet, it's going to be a full featured tablet -- neither the Nook Tablet or the Kindle Fire is that. If I'm going to get an ebook reader, I don't need $100-$150 more device than reading ebooks requires.
Okay, I bought a Fire yesterday with my bonus from work. I was thinking of an IPod Touch as we bought one for each of our kids for Christmas. But I wanted something different, not to mention $100 cheaper. I already have a Kindle with the keyboard so I'm familiar with the basic concept here. For $200, the Fire does exactly what you expect and it is a bargain IMO. I consider it a glorified e-reader that can run apps and surf the web better than the standard Kindle- and in color. I'm not seeing any os issues that others have complained about so far. I think Amazon did a software update recently to deal with some of the issues. Web browsing is working fine with my home wi-fi and my mobile hotspot.
I think my browser on it is a bit slow in some circumstances. And there are inconsistencies with the browser when you click a link (usually lights up in orange, but sometimes, like on google.com, does not...).
