Kindle Fire- What’cha Got?

Well, I’ve had hmmm, 11 days to get to know my Fire. So, what can it do? I won’t ask “what can’t it do?” because there’s plenty it cannot do. I’m a realist, sorry. It is not an iPad, people.

It works great for checking my email and checking on Facebook. It also works well when someone links to a website (in email or on FB) that I want to read.

Here are a few photos {I changed the screen to bright for better photos this time }:

 

  

First two are the screen when it is first turned on {the bottom ‘shelf’ are my Favorites- and you can see the stylus I purchased for my Fire}; next two are the upper part of the screen at the ‘home’ screen [indicators show ‘settings’ button, wifi connection and battery life] {it shows you how far you’ve advanced in each book at the top right corner of the book [percentage]}; last is my ‘carousel’ [what I have recently looked at or has been recently downloaded onto the Kindle].

The carousel can be cleared by placing your finger (or stylus) on the book or ‘item’ until a little box pops up with choices (sometimes you will be given other options)

Here is what it looks like when I am browsing online. Facebook, of course

The visibility/quality is good for reading online [but it is small print unless you double click to zoom or ‘pinch’ and stretch- check out the video below]. I can read it but sometimes I zoom in.

It works fine when I want to fill out a survey {I got 10% off from Old Navy} or to fill out a form online {required for the TOS Homeschool Crew often} . It works great to get things from Amazon (of course ). Here is a short and very quiet (purposely) video of me going online and browsing Kindle Free Books.

I have always had trouble selecting “Kindle” on Amazon.com- sometimes it takes me way too many tries. You’ll see me click on “Top 100 Free” more than once also... issues.

My Fire won’t read to me So sad… As much as I dislike the robotic voice on my 2nd Generation, I really liked the option at least. Perhaps I had gotten used to her {I prefer ‘her’ to ‘him’}. From what I understand one would need to purchase an mp3/audio in order to get it to read to you. In that case, I’m content reading on my own

It will download amazingly fast the apps I ‘purchase’ from the App Store at Amazon {I don’t pay for much}. The books available from Amazon are sent directly to my Kindle Fire {just like with my other Kindle}. Also with my Kindle Fire, I noticed I get Prime membership for a month. Nice! Saved me quite a bit on shipping already but not just that, Prime-members also get free video streaming {the selection is somewhat limited} for the length of the membership. Oh, and then there is that Prime-members-Kindle-Fire-owners-thing with the Lending Library… I haven’t checked that out yet.

For now that’s enough I will be doing more posts {hopefully} after I learn more about it. I really really am looking forward to when Fire owners can download directly from places such as Gutenberg and ManyBooks. That will be awesome.

*all links that go to Amazon.com are affiliate links

Kindle Collections Manager

Do you have a Kindle? Do you love your Kindle? Do you have a lot of books on your Kindle? Do you find it somewhat difficult to manage your books/collections? Well, then there is a possible solution: Give your Kindle to someone that does not get annoyed at anything -ever. Problem solved! 

Of course, just kidding. Buy that person their own Kindle! and then download the Kindle Collection Manager. It is in beta at the moment and is only for Windows but it makes it somewhat easier to manage your books/collections on Kindle. Here's how it works, somewhat ;)

You go to Kindle Collections Manager website and register. You will receive an email with the download link. From there you will download the zip file that has the installation software. You will have this application on your computer in whatever location you put it (mine automatically goes to Program Files).

When you want to manage your books, plug in your Kindle to the computer and open the Kindle Collections Manager program. It will come up with a window like this (give or take a few books and most likely the collection titles will be somewhat different ) To get a better look at it, click on image (use back button to come back to this post)

When it comes up, it has every book on your computer that is compatible with Kindle (on the left) and it also shows all the books on your Kindle (on the right). It also shows duplicates –even when you don’t know you have any and even if you think that you don’t have any and it shouldn’t be showing that you do, such as the little snippet below. There are a lot of duplicates on my Kindle according to this.

You can rename your books, delete them (gasp!) and/or move them into collections or start new collections. When you download the software it comes with a “Brief instructions” notepad document. It’d be good to read that over before going to far but as far as I can see, this program is fairly easy to use

Well, another software/application to add to my growing number of technology gadgets