I have been asked by several people to share my opinions about my new Kindle Fire so I decided to write my short review here so I can drive traffic to my blog.  I had an ipad that I occasionally used, but most of the time I found the ipad to big.  I didn’t want to lug it around places, and even when watching tv to look up something I felt it was to big and would use my android phone just as much.  I went ahead and pre-ordered a Kindle Fire from Amazon.  I’m usually not an early adopter like that, but I really liked the size and the price.

The Kindle is the perfect size for me.  It is small enough to be highly portable, and large enough to be easy to read on, and consume other web content.  I watched an episode of Arrested development and it streamed just fine and was easily large enough for me.  Since I am an Amazon Prime member I really like having the free streaming available.  I also am a audible user, and the audible app works great too.  I uploaded all of my music onto my Amazon cloud drive and now I have over 15,000 songs I can stream to my kindle.  For the times when you don’t have internet access the kindle will hold about 6GB of movies, music, apps, etc.  That is plenty to last me until I have wifi again.  It does take some planning, but that isn’t a deal breaker for me.  The device feels really well built.  It is a little thick compared to some newer devices, but is was ok.  The battery life was fine too.  I used it for about three days before having to charge it again.  It charged very fast.

Instead of using the andriod marketplace the kindle uses amazon’s android market.  There isn’t as good of selection avialable, however if you can download the APK files you can manually install them on the kindle and they work fine.  I downloaded and installed LDSTools and Gospel Library that way since they are not in the amazon andriod market.

a few complaints …  1. web speed on the kindle is pretty slow.  It streams movies and music fine, but loading a web page seems to take several extra seconds.  I don’t know if it is the device or the built-in browser.  I’ll try downloading an alternate browser and see if that makes any difference. 2. No hardware button for volume.  I’d prefer to easily turn the volume up or down via a hard button instead of having to go into the settings and adjusting it.

Overall I prefer my Kindle to my ipad especially considering the cost.  I have already given my iPad to a co-worker as I won’t be needing it.  It might not be for everyone, but The size and cost are perfect for my needs.