BEDUS Day 9: I'm on Fire!

Today, I got a Kindle Fire in the mail courtesy of some good family friends of ours. Besides feeling super excited because the Kindle Fire is an awesome piece of tablet, I am a bit overcome with the generosity of those around me. I've never really had money to throw about, which has always caused a bit of disconnect with some of those around me at school. That's not to say I've missed out on anything (in fact, I have been quite lucky to have lived quite a wonderful life full of wonderful toys thus far), but I would have never particularly felt the need to get myself a tablet/iPad because it's one of those things that's a luxury, not a necessity. That being said, my first impressions of this thing is that IT'S REALLY FREAKING AWESOME. OK so it must be noted that it's neither a Kindle nor an iPad. It's 7 inches, black, sleek, with a matte back that I absolutely love since even though I gravitate towards smooth and shiny things, I am very afraid to scratch them in any way.

I'm pretty enamored by the way it reads because that's what I feel like I am going to use the Fire to do: read books, papers, news, etc. The screen is really clear and the font, font size, line spacing, and color are all adjustable so you can adjust to your comfort. It's quite intuitive, though when you read books and want to leave the book, it takes a little practice to be able to push right at the right spot to get the menu screen to come up. It's got great color, which makes reading scientific papers a joy because, what's a figure without color right? And to my surprise, the sound system is really good, and it's quite easy to import your music into Amazon Cloud.

What's not so easy is to get documents into Amazon Cloud. Basically, you have to email them into your Amazon inbox and then it takes a bit for the to actually download onto the Fire. It's not that much trouble, and if I was traveling, it's not like I would have internet to download stuff straight onto the tablet anyways, but it just means I have to be on my game and put all my documents onto the tablet before going off on a trip. I've already been experimenting with the relative ease of reading PDFs and it's a pretty good deal.

Another gripe that people have is the limitations of the Amazon App Store. There are a bunch of ways to get around this by downloading apps that let you download apps, but to be honest, this does not bother me too much. I'm not too interested in gaming on my tablet because touch screens never really do what you want them to do, and I've always found a paper calendar works much better than an electronic calendar. I do appreciate the weather app and the Pandora app, and the Tumblr app (and I really wish that there was a Blogger app), but I do have Blogger on my phone, so I think that will suffice for traveling purposes.

Woah I just realized that you can make notes in your books and look up definitions to things. THAT'S AWESOME.

Finally, there's this thing about customization. Do I wish I could change the gray bookcase background? Yeah, kinda. Is it a make or break? Not really. I do actually like the lock-screen background pictures, but I could see how some people would want to customize those too.

Oh yeah, and the people whining about the on/off switch being on the bottom? What. Ever.

In general, I find the Kindle Fire a great tablet and know that I am super lucky to have one. And I know that I'm going to be happy not lugging my laptop around campus just to read things. :D