Kindle Fire - Part 3

Part 3 - Kindle Fire Review - My First Stumbles

Getting the Kindle Fire set up wasn't flawless.  My first stumble was with configuring email.  There was no native exchange support, but the Kindle did graciously advise me to go to the app store to find an app for that.  It seemed like an odd thing to omit, it seems to show business users were not a top priority for the Kindle Fire designers.  Perhaps a mis-step, almost every Kindle Fire I've seen "in the wild" has been in the hands of a person travelling for business, with the occasional college student (usually female, presumably more women than men read books for leisure in college) thrown in.

ETA: The draft of this review included the above statement before Tech Crunch came out and confirmed my observation: More women than men use the Kindle Fire.  If you're a man, don't let that put you off, buy one and represent!  Or maybe you should wait, more on that in a later post.

My second stumble was when typing.  I wrote the first draft of this in the Evernote app on the Kindle Fire.  The stumble was with the placement of the period key. I was going to make a screen capture to illustrate my typing woes, but (a) screen capture on the fire is non-existent out of the box, a shortcoming of the Android 2.2 OS the Fire is based on, and (b) you get the idea without really seeing it, just imagine periods in lieu of every 3 out of four spaces.

Next up: Where for art thou, comma? / Editing / cover flow (K-version vs. Apple) / Setting settings, everywhere.

Kindle Fire - Part 2

The ongoing story of my first use of a Kindle Fire...

My first thought with the Fire in hand was how to get it setup and associating it with my Amazon account.  On other Android devices I’ve used setup began with turning the device on and immediately being asked to connect the device with a Google account.  The Fire does not care if you have a Google account or not, but the device is only useful when associated with an Amazon account, doubly so with an Amazon Prime Account (more on that later).  So how to connect the Fire to an Amazon account?  

If you purchase a Fire directly from Amazon you do nothing, the nice folks at Amazon set this up for you.  If you need to do it yourself it is an each process  I discovered in a few minutes of playing with a Fire in a store.  Just touch the gear Icon in the bar at the top of the screen.

This is probably a good place to mention The Touch Screen Factor.  The Fire has a touch screen.  Not a big deal and easy to handle on phones, even convenient.  The transition to a tablet or Fire takes a little getting used to.  The Fire has some weight to it, and you need to hang on to it.  Getting too grabby could mean accidentally clicking things.  This is where the generous bezel around the Fire’s screen comes in.  It seems excessive when just looking at the device, but pick one up and you’ll understand the benefit, whether by design or not.

Once the Fire and my Amazon account were linked the Fire immediately displayed my library of books.  The Fire also detected apps I've purchased from the Amazon Android app store and displayed them in a list with the option to install each app.  Not being an app-hoarder I chose a few to try on the Fire.  I'm not a person who has hundreds of apps and I also don't install everything on every device.

Next up: My first stumbles.

Kindle Fire Review - Intro

My company let me use a Kindle Fire for a couple months, this is (the beginning) of the story of what I found.  

First, a little background.  My only prior exposure to the Kindle Fire was playing in a store for 15 to 20 minutes.  My cell phone is an iPhone,  so I'm used to touch screen keyboards, but that also means I've been exposed to the screwy- in my opinion- iPhone autocorrect.  More on that later.  I do have access to an Android phone for software development (Android 2.2 OS), so I'm not unfamiliar with Android (the underlying OS of the Kindle) and have used a small collection of Android apps from both the Android Market (now Google Play) as well as the Amazon app store.  Evernote is one app I've used on both iOS and Android and also happens to be where the draft version of this was written (written initially on the Kindle Fire, then 'cleaned up' for posting).  My very tech savvy employer has also supplied me with an iPad (initially a v1 then traded up for an iPad 2) which I use primarily for note taking and business intelligence demos (using MicroStrategy).

When it comes to eReaders, I have a first generation Kindle eInk reader, a very pleasant reading device that is probably the primary reason I haven't bought a Kindle Fire of my own.  The eInk device just works, satisfying all by eBook reading needs.  But when the opportunity to test the Fire came up I was willing to try a swap.

Coming next: Impressions from my first use of the Fire.