Maybe I was more enthusiastic about the hype and the purchasing adrenaline of the holidays but I purchased the Kindle Fire in between Christmas and New Years. When the first Kindle came out I assumed it was just another gadget like the Roomba (robotic vacuum), an electronic device that does serve a purpose but not highly functional and definitely not worth the four hundred dollar price tag (both mentioned were around four hundred dollars at the time). The other reason is because I wasn't in the market for an e-reader or a tablet at the time, that was in 2009. In 2011, when Amazon came out with the fourth generation Kindle and lowered the price to seventy nine dollars, it was more reasonable but I still wasn't interested because an e-reader wasn't on my purchasing list, the Kindle was not versatile enough. You're going to pay seventy nine dollars and still have to pay for the book (maybe less for the e-book but you still have to pay). However, one of my close colleagues at work has been reading off the original fourth generation version all the time. She then upgraded to the Kindle Touch and gave the original to her daughter, then she bought the Kindle Fire version and gave the Kindle Touch to her other daughter. She showed me the Fire and a week later I'm watching Sons of Anarchy season one on it, in which I missed a few episodes when it was being aired on television. I'm going to start watching season two this weak on the Fire, because I missed season two completely as it aired on television. I already watched season three and four on television.
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Newstand
Subscribe to magazines and newspapers like Wired, The New Yorker, The New York Times...
e-Books
The first eBook I read on my Kindle Fire is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I downloaded it for free because a few of my co-workers were talking about it. Every month with Amazon Prime ($79 annually) you get one free e-Book. In terms of display for reading, it is excellent, you can adjust the brightness and change the text smaller or larger. There is even this option where you can touch the screen on that word and the definition for it will popup. It's very clear. If you change the positioning while reading on the Kindle Fire, say tilt it upside down or from vertical to a horizontal position, the screen will balance out to the normal viewing position, so that you won't be reading upside down, this goes the same for all other viewing positions besides e-books (This feature should go under Video or Display but I'll leave it here under this category). It has the touch screen option where you can widen or zoom in by dragging your fingers.
Music
It's good for music at ninety nine cents a song. There are a few rare free songs available to download. The volume on standalone mode, meaning without plugging in speakers or headphones is decent you can hear it well but not in stereo volume. The volume is of course adjustable.
Video
Some movies that Amazon license are free (the really old ones or ones no one ever heard of, possibly just to add to their marketing numbers), others come at a reasonable price ($2.99). On the Kindle Fire you can view shows from channels like the FOX Network, PBS and a few others (again free shows are old or blah shows, the newer or popular ones like Glee or Pan Am at $1.99). The video on this little gadget is above fair. I read the volume depends on the movie or show. These movies or shows are via streaming video, meaning you have to be connected on a Wi-Fi network to watch them. I also heard some movies you purchase can be downloaded onto your Kindle for later viewing but others videos or shows are only available on streaming video. I wish they had a Closed Caption option.
2. I still have the original clear wrap around it until I buy a case for it)
3. The picture is a bit clearer, blogspot.com formats the photo
Docs
The first document in this section will be the Kindle Fire User's Guide (the guide shows the many basic functions on how to use the Fire). You can store documents in this category. You can't create a document in this section. However, I had a document of phone numbers on my laptop and I was able to email the Amazon provided email address: andrew@kindle.com (example) and that document of phone numbers showed up on my Fire in the Docs section. The bad side is that it didn't allow me to accept or deny the document, it just appeared there. This could be bad in the case of spam or malicious inserting unwanted documents on my Fire, even though you can remove them from the carousel.
Apps
The limited Android market. You don't get access to Google's full Android market due to Amazon not licensing it fully with Google. They save a few million and Kindle Fire users save $300.00 or more compared to the Apple's iPad. But the iPad is way more versatile and comes with way more applications. There is a fun to play App. requiring good balance and coordination called Seven Stars 3D in which you tilt the Fire physically to move this ball to maintain it on a thin platform, one wrong movement and the balls falls off the edge.
Web
The web is via Wi-Fi, no 3G yet. The browser is nice, it loads small, but you can enlarge it to your fit. It can be changed from mobile to full view. The cache can be cleared.
---It has 5.35GB or 5.37GB of usable Hard Drive memory to store content, they say 8GB, but 2.6GB of memory is used for the OS, cache and operation. If you store over that you can store the rest on Amazon Clouds and start deleting from your carousel to make more room on your Fire.
---8 Hours of battery life, I confirmed this is close to true in watching over 6 hours of movies until the battery bar got almost diminished.
---Dimensions: 7.5" x 4.5"
---Screen: 6.0" x 3.5"
---The only three external button or ports are the:
--Power On/Off
--USB 2.0
--Headphone
---Holding the Kindle Fire is with ease, so far no clumsy dropping it.
---Right now the Kindle Fire is probably in it's introductory phase, I hope they improve on features and functionality because they have been selling like hotcakes. There are flaws to this device, for one it has a powering flaw where it won't charge and the image for a book on the carousel to display the image of which book it is, won't show.
In any case I will be picking up Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins this Thursday, the second book in the novel of The Hunger Games, because I enjoyed The Hunger Games, I heard they are making The Hunger Games into the movie. My friend told me the movie rights were sold before the book was even written. And this was several years ago, I just heard of The Hunger Games last month. The Hunger Games is along the lines of Harry Potter and Twilight, which I never got into. But I do own Twilight (the first version) book, which I started reading half way and stopped. Right now, I'm almost done with reading an economics and sociology book, reading both at the same time, as if I get bored with one I switch to the other.
---I might update on this blog subject, but...
---That's it for now
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