I'm excited about it. I have owned the 2nd gen and 3rd gen Kindles and have really grown to love them over the years. So much easier than carting around a stack of books whenever I travel.
Meredith just bought an iPad. It's nice. I've messed around with it a little. They've spent some time making things look pretty cool and aesthetically pleasing. Lots of little animations and graphical things. It looks sharp. But it was also crazy expensive.
A lot of people are thinking that the Kindle Fire will be a direct competitor or a "iPad killer." But I don't think so. I don't think they really have much intention of trying to dethrone the King of Tablets. Though with a $200 price tag and Android installed, these things are going to be popular.
I think it is all about having all of your Amazon content in one place and being able to enjoy it on one little device. So I already have a bunch of Kindle ebooks. I already have some Amazon Cloud player music that I stream on my desktop and phone. I already have movies and TV shows that I've bought on Amazon Instant Video that I play on my Sony TV. I'm also an Amazon Prime member, so I have access to a huge library of free streaming movies and TV shows. I already have a few Amazon App Store apps I bought for my phone. So I'm expecting that the Kindle Fire can collect all this content in one place and I can enjoy it from just about anywhere courtesy of "The Cloud". I like the concept a lot.
That way the next time I decide to do a Battlestar Galactica marathon on the big TV in the living room and get the evil eye from Meredith, I can just switch to watching it on the Kindle Fire and move to a different room.
Once I get mine in my little grubby hands and have a chance to play with it a little, I'll do a little write up about my impressions.
In the meantime, here's a video that Engadget did of a Kindle Fire demo done by an Amazon rep.
3 comments:
Nice review, I wonder how many gigabytes these new Kindle Fires will have? How about a slot for a memory card?
I also have quite a few Audible books (which is now owned by Amazon, too), which I could throw on my 3rd Generation Kindle, but it would eat up a lot of the existing memory.
Personally, I am very biased against Apple (r.i.p Steve, since that was recent) because of their very expensive price point. That and I was recently mucking about with my daughters iPod Touch, and it would not (not at all easily, perhaps there is a difficult way) let me put any of my own mp3's on it, only music purchased through iTunes.
Having said that, I have noticed Audible makes it very difficult to own your own copies of your Audible books for playback on your various devices, unless you keep paying for a subscription with them. Which reminds me of iTunes.
I'm not sure if you mentioned it in your review, but does it have color e-ink, that is easily readable in regular daylight (or house light)? That's a major plus for me as well, on my current 3rd Gen.
Otherwise, love the Kindle. It is truly amazing to be able to carry a library around with me, in a leg pocket on my cargo pants.
I came to your blog through a link in your Google help profile (I had an issue with monetization on YouTube) so thank you again for your help with that.
Cheers.
@Zuggernaut
The Kindle Fire has 8GB of internal memory, which is twice that of the 3rd Gen Kindle.
I'm not familiar with Audible, but it looks as though you can buy/download content directly from the Kindle interface as well as having your existing content wirelessly delivered to your kindle as well.
The Kindle Fire has an IPS multitouch color display...more like something you'd find on a computer or iPad. It's not e-ink. I should have called it out, but that is one of the reasons that the Kindle Fire won't be a replacement for my 3rd gen Kindle... the e-ink is just much easier on your eyes to read for long periods or in sunlight. Not to mention the battery life is better.
I'm looking at the the Kindle Fire as more of a multimedia device rather than a reader.
The Kindle Fire is also only wireless, no 3G connectivity which makes sense since streaming video is a bandwidth hog.
Once I get to play with it I'll write up a better more intensive review.
Ah, I'll try to come back and read your review once you've had a chance to try it out.
I should have been more clear, Audible is a fairly popular place to buy *audio* books in some circles, nowadays. It can be a much faster way to, sort of, digest a large book. Longer then a TV show, but generally less time spent on it, then actually sitting and reading a traditional book, and can be listened to while doing other things, such as working (if not needing to concentrate on either too much), or exercising, or driving (especially road trips). It has a fairly diverse selection of audio books, similar to the selection of paper books one might expect from Amazon itself. The fiction books can be very entertaining, it's not like listening to one of those stuffy old traditional self-help audio books from the 80s and 90s. Audible's non-fiction stuff is often made well too.
So, yeah, in a roundabout way, I suppose part of my point was an 8 hour audio book will take up some significant space in the memory, when compared to some music albums of mp3s one might put on their Kindle. Let alone a bunch of the audio books.
Since they're all Amazon products, I was curious if or how they would integrate that.
Thanks for the tip that Audible will transfer the audio books wirelessly, that is convenient and I did not know that! (or really consider it, I've only ever transferred ebooks and such)
Anyways, cheers!
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