Tag Archives: kindle fire

Bought the new Ipad Mini

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I thought about it for a few weeks when it was first announced, and then I finally bought an Ipad Mini. Before buying this item, I owned an Ipad 2. The interesting thing is that the Ipad Mini is not that much different than the Ipad 2 (same resolution and such), but I had needed a larger storage space than my 16GB Ipad 2, so I went with a 32GB Ipad Mini.

After finding a case for the device, I’m pretty happy with it. My only concern is that some of the apps that I had on the Ipad 2 don’t seem to be available. It’s not because the Ipad Mini can’t run them, but for some reason some of the apps I originally installed on the Ipad 2 just don’t seem to be available any more. An example is Okcupid’s app, which I always liked. The app store can’t seem to find it. The same thing happens with my retirement fund app, which was on my previous Ipad and on my Iphone. The app store doesn’t think it exists.

Other than that, there’s really not that much different, other than it is a bit smaller than my Ipad 2 and a lot lighter. To be honest, I like the idea that it’s a lot lighter; the Ipad 2 was always a little bit too heavy for the kind of device that it was.

The resolution, the biggest complaint most reviews have, doesn’t really matter to me. It seems to be one of those complaints people have if they’ve already had a device that uses the retina diplay. My Ipad 2 didn’t have one, so I’ve not been swayed by how great such a display might be. I suspect if the Ipad Mini sells well enough, we’ll see a retina display in Ipad Mini 2. Until then, I’m quite fine with what it does.

My biggest desire for this device is to read my Kindle books. I have a Kindle Fire, but it constantly has problems downloading books that I buy. You’d think Amazon’s Class A product would be able to do everything it needs to do. I finally gave up on it when it wouldn’t download a copy of the book, The Hot Country by Robert Olan Butler, after I bought it directly from Amazon’s site. My Ipads did it just fine. The Kindle Fire just can’t see it in the cloud or on its device. Such a crappy product (the Kindle Fire).

So, I finally have the device I’ve been waiting for, and it wasn’t really that expensive. Not often you can say that.

Why I won’t be buying the new Kindle Fire HD or whatever it’s called

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For some bizarre, masochistic reason, I have bought practically every version of the Kindle that has been made. The last one I bought was the Kindle Fire when it first came out. And that device is the reason I have decided to pass on anything in the future made by Kindle.

My needs are pretty simple. What I wanted was a device that could allow me to read books (which it does), maybe listen to a bit of music (which it kind of does, as long as you put your entire music library on Amazon’s cloud), and can place certain documents I need to read onto it as well (that one completely fails). For days, I have been trying to get my Kindle Fire to recognize a pdf document that I need to refer to quite often at work. It can’t. Or it won’t. Not really sure if it has a mind of it’s own, but it won’t read the document, no matter how many times I have tried to make it do so. I sent it using the email address they gave me to upload documents. After establishing that the email account I sent it from was legit, it should have been a breeze. I mean, my old Kindles did it just fine.

But no, it doesn’t see it no matter what I do. The document shows up on my “Manage Your Kindle” page, but my Kindle Fire just pretends it’s a stupid rock whenever I try to upload it/download it/pray to the Gods of Shaniaism, or whatever. It just won’t do it.

The truly sad thing is that my Kindle app ON MY IPAD 2 reads it just fine. But I bought the Kindle Fire so I could use these documents that can’t be read.

And don’t get me started on wifi access. It has the ability to connect with wifi, but 9 out of 10 times, it can’t seem to do anything once it connects. It doesn’t matter if I’m at work, at home, at the Pentagon, in the front lobby of Amazon. When it comes to wifi, they need to stop using a ten year old child hacker to develop their infrastructure.

Which tells me that whatever NEW Kindle they created is as fubar as this one. I mean, this was the expensive baby that the Kindle was selling as the be all Kindle. If they can’t make their best model do something simple, then I’ve given up on them. I’ll still use a kindle app, but I’ll be doing it on other devices, because, to put it succintly, Amazon sucks big time when it comes to making products.

The Amazon Kindle Fire…first impressions

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Over the weekend, I went to Best Buy to purchase a new keyboard that I didn’t actually need. It was to replace a gaming keyboard I have that works great, but I decided that because their new gaming keyboard (by the same company) was on sale, I wanted to buy it. It does absolutely nothing new that the old one doesn’t already do, nor is it more stylish or have any extra buttons the old one lacked. But it was on sale, and it was new. So I went and bought it. Yes, I am aware that I am Best Buy’s proverbial wet dream of a client, and I understand that.

To make matters worse, I found my keyboard I didn’t need, started walking to the register and then decided out of the blue that I was going to buy a brand new Kindle Amazon Fire. Already owning a Kindle and having the Kindle app on my Ipad 2, I obviously didn’t need one, but it was there at the store, staring at me, so I felt I had to buy it. So I did. And then I bought the extra pack with it, that cost me an extra $100 for a $50 Amazon gift card, a case and ear phones, all of which I didn’t need either. But happy with my purchase, I took it home.

I’ve had the weekend to play with Amazon Kindle Fire, or the Kindle Amazon Fire, or the Amazon Kindle on fire, or whatever it’s actually called, and I can say that it’s kind of cool. It lets you access the Internet, like my computer and Ipad 2 already do. It lets you download your music library, which Amazon first forced me to upload to its “cloud” first, taking about a day and a half to do so. But then I got to download my music, which I already had on my computer and Ipad 2 in the first place. I mean, convenience knows no boundaries, right?

Then I downloaded some of my books which I had already bought on the previous Kindle and put them on my new Kindle so I can ignore them and not read them there, much like I did with my original Kindle. Then I sat down and read a hard copy book (Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running) that didn’t need the Kindle or the Ipad 2 at all.

Joking aside, the Amazon Kindle Fire is kind of nice. Negatives: It doesn’t have 3G, so you have to use it over wireless only. Kind of a down side. It also makes it difficult to do certain things, like add my Amazon $50 gift card. I had to actually sign onto Amazon with my regular computer to have that $50 gift card registered. There really should have been a simplistic way to do it on the Fire, but there wasn’t. Granted, there may have been some convoluted and difficult way to do it on the Fire, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having the convenient device in the first place. I certainly couldn’t figure it out, other than using their web browser, which isn’t really the greatest browser of all time, even though they called it Silk.

Positives: It can finally read comic books on the Kindle. I downloaded several issues of  Y: The Last Man and was pretty satisfied with it. Down side to that? Yeah, the text is really small because of the 7 inch screen, so I had to really struggle to read the text on the screen. Not a very comfortable way to read a comic book (or graphic novel), but sometimes you get what you get.

Overall, I think it’s pretty cool if you don’t already own an Ipad 2. If you do, then the only real advantage is that there are some magazines and newspapers that refuse to release on anything BUT the Kindle Fire, which is a travesty of an economic plan. In the end, it’s going to kill those magazines because people aren’t going to buy the Amazon Kindle Fire just because Macworld refuses to let Amazon release it to the Ipad 2 Kindle app (which CAN read it just fine). Again, the biggest draw back to the whole Amazon Kindle model is that book publishers aren’t playing along. I refuse to buy a book published by a major publisher that plays games with the Kindle at their outrageous prices of $14.99 and up. Instead, I often choose not to buy the book at all, which is why I haven’t bought the new biography of Steve Jobs, even though I wanted to read it. The publisher is being a complete asshole to readers, so they can go screw themselves, and I’ll buy it when it gets released as remainder issue stock.

Instead, I’ve been buying books that are showing up at the below $9.99 price, unless I can find it cheaper as a paperback, like is happening with The Girl Who Played With Fire, which is still being priced as if it’s a brand new hard back book for the Kindle. As long as publishers refuse to do proper business with Kindle customers, then I say they can go screw themselves and their legacy models. Instead, I bought four other books that were decently priced, and I’ll avoid reading them (due to laziness)  instead of the books I would have bought and avoided reading as well.

Comparing the Ipad 2, the Kindle Fire and a block of wood

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I know everyone has been wondering about the similarities and comparisons of these three media devices, so I’ve decided to devote a column to examining just that. Now that Apple has had its Ipad 2 out for some time, Amazon announced its Kindle Fire to be released in November, and Home Depot has chopped up a block of wood into the size of a cube, I figured it was time to see how they differ from each other.

The Ipad 2: It’s a lot like a Star Trek data pad, and it runs on some kind of processor that may or may not have powered the space shuttle. It has been known to make really geeky guys very popular with hot supermodels, and the first time I turned it on, it made my IQ go up a whole 25 points.

Specs: It has a color screen, it has some funky icons on the screen that don’t make a lot of sense, but you can touch them and they do all sorts of weird things. Sometimes, when you’re not paying attention, it plays music, sometimes even from your own music library. One person who worked at the Apple Store referred to it aptly as “magical”, and that’s about all the information I have on it.

The Kindle Fire, of which I don’t have an actual picture because it hasn’t appeared in flesh yet, is a lot like the earlier Kindle, except more expensive and it does more stuff. It is also in color and from the picture seen, beautiful women have them on the beach, pretending to read them while they really sit there looking pretty, knowing that I’m watching and they’re not going to talk to me no matter what sort of line I come up with, like “Hey, Baby, I saw you over here, and I was over there, so now that I’m over here and, um, well, I, uh….” yeah, that’s how most of my pick up lines end up. Yeah, I’m not really proud of that.

Specs: Like the Ipad 2, it’s magical. It has little gnomes inside it that retrieve information for you from the Internet, and if you feed them well, they get you more information that you can use at a later time.

 

A Block of Wood. Surprisingly, this doesn’t compare well to the Ipad 2 or the Kindle Fire. It’s only value is the fact that it’s been around a very long time, and you can make things with it, like wooden Ipad 2’s and wooden Kindle Fires. But it doesn’t retrieve information from the Internet. It just sits there, doing nothing, like a stupid block of wood.

I really hate it. I wish I never bought it. Stupid salesmen and their Mad Men approach to selling crap I don’t need!

Will the Amazon Kindle Fire Defeat the Powerful Apple Ipad 2?

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I’m reading a lot of blogging that is exactly this subject: Will the Amazon Kindle Fire defeat the powerful Apple Ipad 2? I’m going to go out on a limb and just say no. It won’t. But instead of treating this as an either/or situation, I’m going to talk about why the question shouldn’t be asked in the first place.

You see, the Apple Ipad is in a class of its own, a class to which no tablet has come close yet. The Motorola Xoom was released as the potential “Ipad killer” but it did no such thing. As a matter of fact, shortly after releasing the Motorola Xoom, the Motorola Xoom became the Motorola Xoom killer. It was decently constructed, had no apps made for it and relied on an app market that is woefully inadequate. To this day, I have a Xoom but I don’t use it for anything other than checking email at night (while my Ipad charges). Even when you found an app that might work for it, quite often it didn’t, and instead you ended up having to uninstall something you paid for (and couldn’t get paid back for if it didn’t work).

For months now, the talk has been all about the new tablet that was going to be released by Amazon. And it looks like it’s about to be released. Here are some of the particulars:

It has only wifi, it’s in color, and it has some apps it can run but they come mainly from Amazon’s online app store. It only has 8 gigs of RAM, and they’re not planning to up that on this particular model (although they might on subsequent versions of the model to be released later). Like I said, it has wifi only, so there’s no 3G, like you get for the main Kindle. And it will cost about $199.

Thoughts? The price is great. It serves as a great replacement for a Kindle if you already have one. It will do a few more things than a Kindle can do, like check email, and maybe play some music and videos (not sure on that last one yet, although details seem to point in that direction). What I really like about it is that now I can read books on a Kindle that has color (whereas I was reading my Kindle books on a Kindle app on my Ipad, because it was the only way to see color on a Kindle-bought book).

It’s not a replacement for the Ipad because it’s not as powerful as an Ipad, doesn’t do as much as an Ipad, and well, it’s just not an Ipad. It’s another Kindle, which will do what normal Kindles do, but be more like a Barnes & Noble Nook Color but not as dysfunctional as that product.

I’ll probably buy one. Do I need one? No. Not really. But I have a Kindle, and I like my Kindle. This will be a Kindle capable of doing more things than my current day Kindle, and I sort of like that. But it won’t replace my Ipad, which is still the one device I carry with me everywhere.