Posted on 11/27/2011 6:21:00 AM PST by Eye of Unk
Has anyone bought the Kindle Fire yet? Is it an adequate tablet and book reader? With my town having lost its brick and mortar book store all I have is miniscule supermarket best sellers. I do not want to invest in an Ipad, I do like the Kindle foe e-book reading but the Fire at its low price is very tempting, I would like to hear of any reviews, the ones I see on Amazon I have to kinda take for a lot of favoritism.
I bought one for my husband and he loves it. It’s a great device for the money and I like the size better than my IPad. It’s much more portable.
I have a Nook Color, and I’ve rooted it into a full Android tablet. Not difficult to do. (Here is one example: http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93234 ) Then you just go to the Google Android marketplace, download the B&N Nook ap and the Amazon Kindle ap, both free, and you can source e-books from either site.
My wife just got one and likes it very much.
I haven’t played with it yet but I will say that I was very impressed with the graphic display while playing streaming media. Excellent picture.
Can the Fire copy and paste text from the web browser screen?
How do you do that?
I myself would OCR them, because any book in PDF I have is a reference book, and I need the word search and highlight feature.
To add to the discussion, I do not yet have a kindle, just Kindle for the PC, and I have no desire for a reader swiss army knife. Just downloading andreading for me. No web browsing, no apps no texting, nothing but reading. Ideally a large screen with no texting keys would suit me (no such animal yet).
I do it all the time. In fact, this post is coming to you from My kindle as we speak. (um, post)
CC
After reading some buyer comments about the Fire at Amazon some have pointed out a security flaw, that anyone who picks up the Fire, a friend, co-worker or a thief can immediately access you Amazon account.
Went to town and again looked at the regular Kindle and some other pads like the Galaxy and the Xoom, the display Ipad I could not figure out how to work, I tried swiping, tapping, turning and it just would not cooperate. Either it was locked up or it requires some sort of blood or sperm sample first for ID.
I think this is a temporary fad, I will just get a decent laptop, those are being ignored big time and the prices are falling.
I expect these pads will do an advanced cascade advancement pretty quick,by next year there should be some improvements. I remember saving all my limited funds years ago to buy the top of the line PC at 700mhz or something, cost me $2,000, of course a decent cellphone can do that or better for a lot lot less. And it was obsolete in less than 6 months.
So as I see it the Fire has a poorly positioned power switch, gets too hot where you hold it, cannot easily transfer photos and has a limited capacity, also when viewing a widescreen movie the image is distorted. And then it also supposedly is too open security wise.
Just because its a cheap tablet does not mean I am going to run with the herd on this, I believe it needs to go through another phase to address these and other issues.
Sorry if I sound like a person that hates technology, far from it, but over the years I am totally turned off buying anything new and cutting edge, worst was when I bought the latest and most expensive Toshiba laptop at $3,100, and two months later some chocolate milk spilt on the keyboard it killed it, absolutely killed it, I still have it as a door stop to remind me of my lunacy to never ever repeat the same mistake. No its not for sale, it could be repaired eventually.
It sounds like a lot of people are happy with it, I do not have any wi-fi in my house that I can think of, I am currently in rural Alaska, on dial-up only, too expensive to get anything else and it does just fine, the Fire not having 3-G seems to be another issue. It requires me to drive to civilization, more fuel costs.
Thanks folks but sorry, I’m passing on the Fire, I really was wanting to get one but after putting a pair of darker glasses on and reading the specs its too immature I think.
“The fact is that, the Fire should not have to cost anybody anything, and it should be free if it’s mostly a POS device in every home.”
I’ve felt that way about the iPad - a device for purchasing more stuff that starts with an “i” with great speed and convenience.
I think that Amazon WOULD give them away for free if hackers wouldn’t root them and repurpose them.
This is probably a waste of time but after this thread died out I went ahead and bought a Kindle Touch 3G Dec. 3rd.
Up until yesterday I have been stuffing it with all my favorite authors from Clive Cussler to Edger Rice Burroughs.
It has over 40 different books, even a book on automatic rifle teardowns. Not the best for illustrations though.
It never strains my eyes, never hiccupped and was very easy to use. I found the Cloud excellent to put up on my puter and thus everything I bought was also readable on the puter scree though that does after a while make my eyes hurt.
My 17 year old son lives in a foster home, he occasionally gets down to the public library but has very little money to buy the books he really wants like good old fashioned sc-fi. Turns out he has the same taste as I have and most of the books in the Touch were to his liking.
Here we have Christmas coming and shortly after that will be his birthday, so I decided to give him my Kindle Touch 3G and I would get another Touch, but Walmart was out of the Kindle Touch 3G, so I did something stupid and bought the Kindle Fire.
That was yesterday afternoon, I immediately found that unless you get it registered its basically useless. I took it home where my daughter has her puter on a wi-fi router along with the wifes puter, min is still on a dialup.
I spent 4 hours trying to get authenticated to no avail, I tried connecting a USB to my puter and doing a registration to no avail, I could not download anything from the Cloud to the Fire until it was registered by the Fire itself, I did enter the serial number on the Amazon site and registered it with Amazon, apparently it requires a software update, it was estimated to be 181MGB and 12 hours download on my puter but the Fire just would not connected to the wi-fi in the house.
I live well away from town and I have no idea how you connect at any wi-fi hotspot, so I was really pissed after all this and I said the hell with it, I did try checking some Kindle Forums and yes quite a few Fires are having this same problem.
I took the Fire back to Walmart last night and got my money back. Unless Amazon gets its act together and offers one with 3G I will never ever consider this device. I may not have the most modern router but I feel this is just being too dependent upon wi-fi and it leaves many people like me frustrated because we are rural and not the urban WI-Fi addictonadons.
My gut feeling was right from the very start and I was lured by the sirens of tech but I escaped without injury, those of you that have the Fire and have no problems I am not against you, its just not going to work for some people.
I may now get another Kindle Touch 3G, it works great as long as I don’t have to download any audio books as they require wi-fi, the 3G download is usually less than 20 seconds. Love that Kindle Touch, basic, easy to use, easy on the eyes.
I still want a tablet but only if its with 3G, maybe a Galaxy or the Xoom.
This is probably a waste of time but after this thread died out I went ahead and bought a Kindle Touch 3G Dec. 3rd.
Up until yesterday I have been stuffing it with all my favorite authors from Clive Cussler to Edger Rice Burroughs.
It has over 40 different books, even a book on automatic rifle teardowns. Not the best for illustrations though.
It never strains my eyes, never hiccupped and was very easy to use. I found the Cloud excellent to put up on my puter and thus everything I bought was also readable on the puter scree though that does after a while make my eyes hurt.
My 17 year old son lives in a foster home, he occasionally gets down to the public library but has very little money to buy the books he really wants like good old fashioned sc-fi. Turns out he has the same taste as I have and most of the books in the Touch were to his liking.
Here we have Christmas coming and shortly after that will be his birthday, so I decided to give him my Kindle Touch 3G and I would get another Touch, but Walmart was out of the Kindle Touch 3G, so I did something stupid and bought the Kindle Fire.
That was yesterday afternoon, I immediately found that unless you get it registered its basically useless. I took it home where my daughter has her puter on a wi-fi router along with the wifes puter, min is still on a dialup.
I spent 4 hours trying to get authenticated to no avail, I tried connecting a USB to my puter and doing a registration to no avail, I could not download anything from the Cloud to the Fire until it was registered by the Fire itself, I did enter the serial number on the Amazon site and registered it with Amazon, apparently it requires a software update, it was estimated to be 181MGB and 12 hours download on my puter but the Fire just would not connected to the wi-fi in the house.
I live well away from town and I have no idea how you connect at any wi-fi hotspot, so I was really pissed after all this and I said the hell with it, I did try checking some Kindle Forums and yes quite a few Fires are having this same problem.
I took the Fire back to Walmart last night and got my money back. Unless Amazon gets its act together and offers one with 3G I will never ever consider this device. I may not have the most modern router but I feel this is just being too dependent upon wi-fi and it leaves many people like me frustrated because we are rural and not the urban WI-Fi addictonadons.
My gut feeling was right from the very start and I was lured by the sirens of tech but I escaped without injury, those of you that have the Fire and have no problems I am not against you, its just not going to work for some people.
I may now get another Kindle Touch 3G, it works great as long as I don’t have to download any audio books as they require wi-fi, the 3G download is usually less than 20 seconds. Love that Kindle Touch, basic, easy to use, easy on the eyes.
I still want a tablet but only if its with 3G, maybe a Galaxy or the Xoom.
Thanks for the update.
It is really interesting to hear the different tolerance level for the complexity of tech products and also the tolerance level for the battle to get any particular product to work.
My level of tolerance for the quirks is fairly high if I can eventually get it to work reliably — my wife’s is zero.
She can barely stand a PC and if it isn’t flawlessly hooked to the internet she is one hacked girl.
I have decided to retain my dial up connection because I can simply disconnect it and have it redial. I tried having my puter on my daughters wi-fi years ago and yes I was able to get images, PDF files and videos much faster but it was like living on an urban inner city highway system, some times of the day like early morning its a breeze, but then you get rush hour traffic.
I think that was the best way to describe a rural broadband connection in Alaska, its like an old fashion party line.
It gets filled up at certain times of the day. But regardless Amazon should really get the Fire with a 3G option just like its other Kindle devices. Yes it will send up the cost but it should still be half the cost of the other tablets.
Right now my limit would be $300 for a tablet, full internet connection on 3G for simple stuff like accessing web pages, news and mail. For any serious downloads like movies then yes I see why it has to use wi-fi, and probably exactly why Amazon decided to keep it wi-fi only, they cannot sell high dollar movies and deliver that product by 3-G as yet.
maybe a 4G?
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