Instant replay, Kindle Fire few day review
So I already have myself more or less migrated to my new Gateway computer. The process has gone smoothly. Phase 2 of the migration will begin today which involves moving Ali over to the Lenovo.
Ali spent the day yesterday wit Sue and Kaitlyn. I couldn’t believe when I had a picture in my email of Sue and Kaitlyn in our unheated pool. The water is in the upper 60’s at this point. I was sure they must have just jumped in and right out but I was surprised to hear they were in the water for around 20 minutes. Sadie was quite happy to get an unexpected December splashy splash session.
They later went to he Naples Zoo which sounded like a fun time as well.
Kaitlyn actually requested that we go back to Sweet Tomatoes again, I guess she liked it that much. I certainly didn’t care if we went back so we did.
When we pulled up to the place the parking lot looked very full. WTF, it’s a Wednesday night? When we went inside it was confirmed, the place was SLAMMED. Everywhere you looked there were bodies shuffling about. The place has a TON of seating but we actually scored what appeared to be the last empty table, wow.
The staff seemed quite surprised by the amount of patrons, they were constantly behind the curve. Tables remained uncleared, food stations had no plates or silverware and many of the food items were either real thin or tapped out. It was pretty nuts by Sweet Tomato standards.
Sue saw the staff scrambling to clear tables so new people could sit down, they were just unprepared to handle this many people. Then before I knew it Sue was up, helping to clear a near by table. She picked up the dirty plates and took them to the central station. The staff saw her doing their job and thanked Sue but told her she shouldn’t worry about it and enjoy her meal.
Well instead of coming back to our table she continued busing empty tables, it was bizarre. I bet she was helping the staff for at least 10 minutes. Eventually the manager came over wondering what was going on. Sue said at first the manager was going to reprimand the staff for allowing a customer to help do their job but Sue explained it was totally her idea and she didn’t mind.
The manager relaxed and thanked Sue again for her help but told her she can now go enjoy her dinner. I was surprised when a few minutes later the manager came up to our table and handed us three free adult meal vouchers as a token of appreciation for Sue’s efforts. Wow, well that’s nice. I still couldn’t believe Sue helped clear the tables, it’s something that would not have even remotely entered my mind. Kudos to her.
When we got home Sue made sure their car was all packed and ready to go as they planned to pull out super early today. I woke up around 4:30 am and said my goodbyes. Ali and I told her that she is welcome to come visit anytime. Her visit was super short, it’s too bad she couldn’t stay a bit longer. It was nice for Ali to see her long time friend after so many years.
Yesterday was Nicki’s 9th birthday. It seems crazy that we have had our little black and fuzzy bundle of joy for almost a decade already. The memories of me telling Ali after the first night of adopting her that it wasn’t too late to return her to the humane society are still fresh in my mind. Luckily Ali didn’t agree with my advice.
The dogs got their own small vanilla cupcakes to celebrate last night. They were quite pleased.
So I now have been playing with my Kindle Fire for a few days so I feel I can offer up a decent review of the device. The cliff note version of the review for those of you with ADD is, I like it and I think it is a nice value for the money. Ok the details.
The Fire is significantly smaller than an Ipad and significantly larger than an Iphone. For what I have used it for so far I found the size of the screen more than adequate. Sure for gaming a bigger screen would be welcomed but it certainly isn’t a huge drawback. The screen quality itself is quite good, on par with what I am used to on the Ipad.
The UI on the Fire is relatively easy to use I had no issues quickly finding my way around. I quickly loaded the Netflix and Hulu apps to test out the video capabilities of the Fire. Both apps performed well and looked good.
One thing I did find annoying was the lack of a hardware based volume control. A couple times I was laying in bed at night reading my online version of Wired. Some parts of it include sound that can be obtrusively loud. In order to turn down the volume I had to awkwardly get back out to the home screen, then to the configuration screen to drag a volume slider down. If you need to do a lot of volume adjustment you will find this annoying. Perhaps just using headphones in bed is a more viable solution.
The integration with the Amazon app store gives what is pretty close to an Ipad like experience when it comes to finding apps although there are definitely less to choose from. Also some Android apps simply do not run on the tweaked OS the Fire utilizes. Amazon has a nice little deal where they make one pay app available for free each and every day. You can’t beat the price but you are rolling the dice as far as just how good/useful the app might be.
The Silk browser with it’s cloud acceleration was a big disappointment. Browsing the web with it was slow and clunky with frequent page time outs, missing images and just a whole bunch of waiting. When I looked online I quickly found that this was a common complaint. The resolution was to just turn off cloud acceleration. After doing that browsing was just fine.
Since the Fire is Android based it has flash support, something which is a gaping hole in the Ipad armor. It was nice to be able to browse flash sites normally. I was even able to use the Sirius flash based page to stream music.
When you buy a Fire it includes a one month membership into Amazon Prime (normally $79 a year). Being a prime member has several benefits including free two day shipping on all purchases and free access to a huge chunk of Amazon’s online video streaming library. I also discovered another perk, the ability to “borrow” one book a month. Basically you are able to download and read one book a month for free. Considering many Kindle books can run you at least 10 bucks it is a nice perk.
The Kindle doesn’t have built in Exchange email support like the Ipad/Iphone does but I quickly found a $9.99 app that offers that functionality and works quite well.
As I said in the beginning, considering the Fire costs 40% of what the cheapest Ipad costs you really get quite a bit for your money. I am quite pleased with my new little toy at this point.
Oh geez I have to do the year end wrap up tomorrow…..