Today is Sunday and my last day off. Tomorrow is back to work and nothing to be excited about except since I am technically working at two jobs, I should be able to acquire a few wireless pieces that I am interested in but may not have a reason to go out of my way to get. The reviews are automatic which may be of benefit to one or more people.
It has been a while since I wrote any product reviews on this blog because every time I make a change in my life routines, some other things change also. Since I moved from a slow retail electronics store location to a much busier one, more than a few things have stopped. Writing reviews was one of them and I expect to pick that up as my schedule is no longer one of the bigger problems of my life. And what is up today? I am writing on my Netbook which has advantages and means I can type more words thus writing clearer prose. My mentors forbid me from rewriting my pieces (though I have to revise a little sometime not to be misunderstood) thus my writing may have improved in thinking quality but my grammar is more or less the same. I still find and and but used interchangeably and missing words bug me but I am not allowed to fix them unless absolutely necessary. I have been permitted to create paragraphs. Solid critical thinking does not follow the rules of good English. Thinking is what is about and writing is needed but not for the sake of the audience. That is why my cellphone has been more than enough for writing things. Being able to stop and write what one is thinking has been far more important than waiting for opportunities to write publication-grade pieces that will have lost much in the process. Today, I write on my Netbook and I can go on and on. I won’t.
I did get my Kindle Touch less than a month ago. The process of acquiring the Kindle was harder than I had expected. Amazon does have free shipping but I was not sure what I was about to do. We happen to be a retail electronics store and sell Kindles also but not in same time schedule as the manufacturers. The older versions of Kindle are still around and have been very popular with many people. We routinely run out of them and last November the new Kindles were finally released. The $79 version which is not touch was the first one to arrive and since then the other models have arrived also. I did have a chance to play with the $79 model when a troubled customer kept coming back asking for help. I guess technology and age do have a few things to clash. I did set up her Kindle on our store WiFi so I could download her Stephen King novel. She had a very hard time registering her Kindle on the Kindle keyboard and eventually had to use a desktop. The book was purchased but would not arrive and she was very frustrated. Our WiFi can win an award when it comes to slowness of speed and lack of cooperation in downloading materials! I did download her book. Amazon claims 60 seconds enough for downloading a book. It takes me three seconds on WiFi at home. It took this lady about 6 or 7 minutes. I sent her on a tour of the store until the download was finished since the progress numbers were very slow. The book did download and she was one of the happiest people I have ever seen in a long time! Is it that difficult to use Kindle?
I did like the $79 model at first greatly. It is small. It has a fine screen. The eInk reads quite well. The navigation buttons actually are much easier to use than expected. I told the lady I will buy one too. She didn’t seem to believe me. I thought about the device and before I get a chance to buy one, other things came up delaying the process. In this time window, Kindle Fire did arrive and behold we had a demo unit from day one. That was nice. I got to play with the demo a little and not much can be done unless one has an Amazon account. I had to set up a fake Amazon account so the features can be used and the device can be tested. That turned out okay. Fire is very easy to use. It looks very sharp. It is bright and fast. I finally figured what the “lag” comments were about. The icons do not respond to touch instantly but I can care less. They work well. If that is not intentional, I am sure it will improve in upgrades. The best I have seen is on Blackberry Playbook. Everyone ought to try the onscreen keyboard. It is one of the best (some say The Best) keyboards on tablets but only Blackberry fans would notice since media coverage is arranged against a product that is not made in USA and has word “black” in its name. iPad gets the honors for many reasons including being “white” from every angle literally and figuratively. The other tablets follow. Amazon Fire fills a great need in the market. The price of iPad (which is a required must-have under rules of popular culture to be “like everyone else” and “not be left out of the crowd.”) is cut-throat for a casual home electronics piece of dubious functions. Lower price devices of similar abilities were greatly in demand but strong media support was needed to have an “approved” product for mass marketing. Amazon allows many to make money off its network and was naturally a great candidate. The rest were Amazon’s own doing. They are not believers in picking pockets for a few dollars more or embarrassing the buyer not to dare to think price. The $200 price tag is an American price. The pressure built by media can be relieved for an average nobody American by buying a $200 device, that though makes a fortune for many companies by being used thus being sanctioned as good enough as iPad in the media, that does everything them tablets do. Therefore one can be “in” and “not left out” without buying an iPad with blood money because advertising pressure is so back-breaking. Millions survived the holiday this year thanks to the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire did pass many tests I had in my mind and was highly recommended to me but failed one big test. I needed the device to be used as a blog/news reader. Reading on Kindle Fire is possible but not the best device. Fire is an entertainment machine. Magazines, movies and other media do wonders on its screen and at its speed. Kindle Fire is the first device that actually works fast on our turtle-speed WiFi. Even iPad cries when trying to use our WiFi everyday. I think doing part of the processing on Cloud helps with this. Fire is a great Media Device but not my top choice for a reader.
My experience of playing with the lady’s $79 Kindle convinced me the new Kindles can do the job for me but many questions left unanswered. I had tried both Pandigital Novel 6″ Black and White and Nook Simple Touch and they all worked enough to be usable but content was the big problem. I couldn’t figure how to use Nook for library borrowing and gave up. Kindle had to be tried. The keyboard on the $79 Kindle works by navigation buttons and is dandy. Later, I thought about my overusing of functions and hardware. That keyboard would drive me nuts. I had to get Kindle Touch to begin. Staples had one but was too far away for a round-trip on a lunch break. OfficeDepot had none and ours were in system and not yet distributed. A co-worker who used to work for Best Buy and refers to them as a “cult” because “they oversell to old people!!!???” happened to open her mouth and tell me that Best Buy “always have everything” when facing my dilemma. When I told her later that I bought my Kindle Touch at Best Buy because she recommended them, that turned into a not happy conversation about the “cult” and “being trained to load up all old people with accessories they already have in the device.” I did get my Kindle Touch. I did get ignored by at least two employees at Best Buy when I asked for help where Kindles were. One that had to talk to me was coming right back. I was too. I found the section and crowds of employees attended it. I had called earlier and did know Kindle Touch was in stock. I said no to service plans and accessories and paid. My experiment of plugging a cellphone charger into the Kindle Touch (out of laziness and curiosity) wondering if it worked, did work. I knew it won’t burn it out and if it did I would exchange it. The charging did work and lasted a few hours. I don’t know about one or two months of charges. Mine drops in charge daily but I have WiFi on a lot and use the WiFi and the screen a lot. I still think the 3G version can be a good buy if money is no object AND one expects to read content of timely nature such as newsfeeds. The local devices work off ATT for free which makes a lot of sense to have and the Special Offers (ads) are a joke. They are cool and entertaining and will never bother you. Buying the Special Offer version is actually a very smart move with no regrets.
I went through many hurdles learning and figuring out what I wanted done and how to do them. As of now, I love my Kindle Touch. My iPhone 3GS served as my fastest access to my rss feeds and since I acquired Kindle Touch, the number of unread rss feeds on my iPhone is in thousands and will climb. I can read very fast on my iPhone but the eInk screen of Kindle Touch is so pleasing, I would rather read and flip through items slowly on Kindle. Personal Documents is a feature of Kindle that allows use beyond the basic ebook reader functions. Amazon has created an email address in my name (I am so important now!) and as long as I authorize the origin email, I can send stuff into the Kindle. I sent a gag photo of myself 
that I had once taken when my hair was too long into the Kindle as as test and it worked great. I have been showing it to people on my Kindle and telling them a copy will be their Christmas present. Kindle is very useful as you can see. I tried sending PDF manuals of various devices and Kindle is great. What sucks is some manuals were written to be as condense as possible. PDF is no good on 6″ screen of Kindle if has to be enlarged. By the way, enlarging can be as easy as expanding by two fingers. It moves fast though and the item can get huge. Moving around documents by dragging is a pain. Kindle Touch is great to read but is no tablet. Tablet-like functions will kill you. They are slow. I went through troubles finding what the processor for Kindle is. I forget and same is used in Kindle, Nook and many others. Slow and cheap? I don’t know but speed is not Kindle’s forte. The touch does work very well. You have to touch a little toward the top of the item or won’t recognize your touch. Bookmarking and accessing menus are very easy. Flipping pages is easy but can jump if you hesitate and you will go forward when you touch to go backwards a lot. It likes to go ahead and will flip if you go back many times only to find the page is not last but next and now you have to go back two pages.
The browser in Kindle is experimental but works great. I learned a trick to read Google Reader on the browser and works but I found free services online that send me my feeds. The best one is Greader2kindle which works great and gets full feeds but is not good for active reading. This is an app installed on PC and one has to manually tell it to get feeds and like to make an ebook for you and send. It can take ten minutes to make this ebook. It reads well however and the only one that gets entire rss feeds for you. Klip.me works great and I use it daily. Their Table of Contents does not work with Kindle Touch and I let them know. I am used to reading but many would be bothered. Klip.me gets Google Reader feeds so is very active and up-to-date but does not have complete feeds. Kindlefeeder is great but does not link to Google Reader and can be used for a few feeds and free version has no automatic sending ability. I use Klip.me and keeps me on top of many things. The only complaints are lack of complete feed articles and the missing table of contents. Otherwise is a great service.
I tried borrowing from the local library and too few books for Kindle. Lots of paperbacks with romantic stories is what they had. I had to get my library card back at a bigger library and they have good books and more coming. I think Kindle books are a great use for the library. I never could read the books they had on Adobe Digital Edition and many books were not on paper. It is also a good library not to visit. A $50 million disgrace to the City. I was told long ago, the old mayor was embarrassed I would go there and complain about the place also. I stopped. I think we all agreed it was best to treat the place as non-existent not to embarrass them. They did not want to deal with anything that had to do with the library. Kindle is a good way to use library resources otherwise unavailable due to whatever.
The free books on Kindle are what bullshit is. Do not believe what you hear about them. As a collection of literature, they are good for high school kids or people who like to “read” because they were taught “reading” in school. The price of available books is huge for an active reader. The borrowers’ library makes sense and I may even pay for my Prime membership (free now) to get access. The newspapers and magazines have been good so far. I only need a couple of newspapers to be involved. San Francisco Chronicle is at times a terrible read. I agreed to forget the comments made to me by some of their top staff how political the staff were they would write crappy stuff on purpose to maintain the level for political reasons. Just pick up any paper from South Bay, East Bay and other areas and no matter how local they may be, they are “readable.” Some major newspapers cannot be “read.” Kindle rescues those of us who “have to read many things.” I enlarge hard texts in size to second largest and the words enter my mind at a glance even if the writing is terrible. I can read plenty of “unreadable” writing on a regular basis. My hands hate the never-ending clicking however. I looked last night and a 200 page text I am reading is about 4000 locations (page view on Kindle screen) which means at my size I have to click 4000 times to read this book. Kindle needs an automatic page flip with adjustable speeds like a slideshow on all photo galleries. That will save millions their body parts for later. I think some newsreader or ability to buy apps for reading would enhance Kindle a great deal also. I look forward to them.
I love my Kindle Touch. I think is worth $100. When I was taught accounting, I learned much of depreciation. I think of what I buy in terms of how much I have got out of them versus what they are worth. I bought two Flip cameras recently for $70. They both broke within a few days in my hands! I still think I got my $70 worth out of them (meaning worthless). What of Kindle? I think it has depreciated about a fraction of a percent of a percent. That means it is a very useful device. I still have a long long way to go before I break it and not feel a loss or can put it aside and think I got my money’s worth out of it. I have to take care of it because it is well worth what it does and hard to get your money out of it.
Get one. It is worth it.
