By John Kamerer
Kindle Fire display. Image from Bloomberg.com
I recently came into possession of Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Now, I’ve been a long-time user of Apple’s iPod touch/iPhone and have used iPads at work, so I’d like to share my findings for those on the fence about whether to buy an iPad or the new Fire device (I’ve also had a Kindle Keyboard since back when it was the only type of this device on the market, so my background experience should also help those looking for their ideal e-reader).
Hardware: The Fire is significantly smaller than the iPad, and is a bit minimalist when the devices are compared side-by-side. The only button is the power button, which is located next to the charging port and headphone jack on the bottom of the device. A possible problem I see is that it would be easy to accidentally bump the power button, but a simple workaround is to simply turn the device upside down (due to the lack of physical buttons, the Fire works exactly as well flipped as it does normally).
The fact that it only comes in an 8GB size (2GB of which is reserved for the operating system) can be a bit of a problem for users with lots of music and videos, but presumably if you relied on Amazon for all of your digital media it wouldn’t be much of an issue due to their cloud storage system. Continue reading ‘Playing with Fire’
