AMAZON KINDLE FIRE : What One Should Expect from a $199 Tablet

People have been harping about the Kindle Fire being the David to IPAD's Goliath. How it will eat a big piece of the apple (pun intended).

That's a piece of bull. If you believe in the hype and you get a Kindle Fire while dreaming of the IPAD's capabilities, you are bound to be dissapointed.

Fortunately, I bought my Kindle Fire for all the right reasons. :-) I was not looking for the IPAD's cheaper sister. All I wanted was a good full color ebook reader that has internet and multimedia capability. Something where I could:

1. Buy and read ebooks conveniently.

English books in Seoul are expensive so buying ebooks from Amazon is the most convenient and cheapest way to satisfy my reading need. This is where Kindle really shines. If like me, you have an amazon account and you enrolled your Credit Card and PayPal account to the Amazon One-Click, it’s so easy to purchase books from your Kindle Fire. As long as you’re connected to the internet, it’s a matter of browsing through the Store and clicking the books you want. The books are automatically downloaded to your Kindle.

2. Buy and Read US magazines at better prices .
The prices for Western Magazines in Korea are atrocious! Through Amazon’s shop, I can buy magazines electronically and get them in full color.

3. Surf the internet.

Kindle Fire uses Amazon’s Silk Browser. It works pretty well for me. Aside from the wifi connection tabs, if you have an iphone with a 3G Data Plan, you can use the iphone tethering capability with your Kindle Fire. I do this at times when I’m out and there is no wifi available.

4. Read office files (pdf, MS Word, MS Excel)

Preloaded with the Quick Office app, it is easy to read and review MS Office files.

5. Watch video streaming when I want to from youtube and ,ehem, pinaychannel.com ( Flash files work with Kindle, yay!). One can also save music files or videos but because it has a smaller memory than my iphone, I keep my music and videos on my phone.

6. Email

Kindle Fire’s Email App allows me to check my emails FROM DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS fast.


I like that it's small, only half of IPAD's size and does not have too many complicated apps or options, because really, my primary consideration was to get a multimedia reader that I can bring to the bathroom or coffee shop, basically anywhere ~ I am not much into viewing photos, playing some songs and watching videos on the Kindle Fire, but it’s nice to know that if I want to I can do these things too.

Yes, the Kindle Fire for me is a great bargain! But for those who have dreams of getting an IPAD clone for $199, these are things that might dissapoint you:

Limited Applications~ As of the moment, except for the pre-loaded applications in your Kindle, if you are outside the US, you can’t download extra apps. The Kindle Fire App Store is currently only available in the US.

This is okay for me as I was not after getting apps for all my whims ~ I can get that through my phone.

No memory card slot~ You cannot expand the memory (8 GB compared to iphone’s 16 GB and 32 GB) which means you cannot save too many movies or songs in this thing.

Limited Customizable Options~ If you are a customization freak ~ wanting to customize the front page, the font, the wall paper of your Kindle Fire, well, you might not like the fact that the you can’t. Or at least not yet.

It’s unfair to compare the Kindle Fire to IPAD when there’s at least a 300$ price difference between them. Kindle Fire will never trounce the IPAD2 but for the basic things it does ~ one-click access to Amazon’s books, magazines and music stores, decent email apps, multimedia capabilities, web browsing and video streaming, I say it does them all pretty well. For a badass less than 10k pesos price tag.


P.S. Other things you might be interested to know:

1.You can upload stuff to your Kindle using the micro-USB slot. I bought a micro USB to USB adapter cord for this. (Cheap too, only about 200 pesos in Korea)

2.Battery time is decent. Mine lasted for two days on standby. Amazon promises at least 7 hours of continuous reading. Pretty decent I think.