Visualization
I can’t make my brain work tonight to come up with words, so instead, pictures:
Pretty typewriter:
Pretty car:
Where there’s smoke (Why the Kindle Fire is not a great tablet and why that doesn’t matter)
First off, the two reviews of the Fire that have resonated with me:
IGN’s review that starts: “I wanted to love the Kindle Fire. I really did.”
And Slate’s review titled “The Underachiever”.
So let’s start with the one thing that everyone can agree on: The on button sucks. It’s hard to turn on when you want to, and easy to turn off when you don’t. The lack of other buttons is also somewhat limiting. I understand the push to move everything to malleable icons that can be controlled by the UI, but I miss the home button from my iPhone and some volume controls would be nice as well.
Speaking of the UI, it is functional, but not slick. If I was hoping for something with the practical ease of use as iOS, I would have been disappointed. The primary function of the UI seems to be to drive one to the Amazon store at any opportunity. The home page is dominated by a scrolling list of icons for apps, etc. that one has used recently, in order of use rather than in order of most used. Under that are smaller “shelves” of pinned icons, which are far more useful. The upper scrolling list could stand to be shrunk down to the same size as the other shelves, and I’m hopeful that will be addressed in a future update.
The screen is a decent resolution and the colors are vibrant. Unfortunately, in sunlight, the glare is a serious problem. Though I had planned to pass along my e-ink Kindle, I think now that I will keep it for reading. The Fire is a little too heavy to comfortably hold for extended periods while reading even without the glare. Watching Netflix has the same problem, but I’m hoping that a case (possibly this one) will offer enough support that I won’t have to hold the Fire while watching.
The app store apparently has some serious holes, but the only one I’ve noticed is Flipboard. Pulse, however, does a decent enough job as a news aggregator. The included e-mail app is serviceable. The web browsing is not as snappy as the pre-release hype would have indicated, but it does well enough. The biggest problem is that the fonts are not easily re-sized and the type is rather small. Good thing I’m near-sighted.
As I said before, I think the speakers are rather good, so I’m not sure what the Slate reviewer is complaining about there.
The touch screen seems less responsive than I’m used to with my iPhone. I don’t know if it’s the fault of the touch system, the UI, or the cpu, but the processor is supposed to be a dual-core, so I’m guessing one of the first two. The keyboard is not big enough to “touch” type on, nor small enough to use both thumbs, so I end up using one index finger, but since I’m used to that from my phone, it’s not that big of a deal.
After all this kvetching, you would have good reason to suspect that I’m disappointed in the Kindle Fire. But I’m not. Not exactly. Did I want it to be a better tablet than it is? Sure, but then I also want Ed McMahon to show up on my doorstep with a million dollars. He stopped doing that over a decade ago, and a $200 tablet is not going to be perfect.
The Kindle Fire is good enough. It’s not as good for reading as an e-ink platform, but it’s good enough. It’s not as slick as the iPad and doesn’t have as many apps as iTunes or even the full Android store, but it’s good enough. It doesn’t browse the web as well as a netbook, but it’s good enough. And it only costs $200.
It may be revolutionary not for how good it is, but by how many new people it brings into the tablet market. I know that I would have put off my purchase of an iPad for at least six months more, if not longer, and the Fire got me to take the plunge early.
I like my Kindle Fire, and I suspect it will tide me over for quite a while. It streams shows and movies from Netflix just fine when I’m lying in bed, and I can check Facebook and Twitter and e-mail and my RSS feeds from the couch. Eventually, I will probably want to upgrade to an iPad, but I can easily wait another generation or two. Unless my wife takes my Fire away from me first.
[Top]Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theatre
Robert said I would blog about the Kindle Fire as soon as I got it. Proving him right once again.
First thoughts upon pulling it out of the box:
Wow, there’s not much in the way of documentation. In fact, none to speak of. One tiny 2×4″ piece of brown paper with instructions for turning it on.
It’s kinda small. The iPad is bigger.
Who needs documentation anyway? It just gets shoved in a drawer and never read anyway. So good on Amazon. As for the size, that minor disappointment disappeared as soon as I turned it on. I’ve never owned an iPad to directly compare the experience, but the Fire is plenty big for what it is.
The screen is nice and clear and colorful. Movies from both Amazon and Netflix looked good, although the Netflix streaming was a bit slow (I’ve had problems with their PS3 app, too). Book text looks crisp. The app store appears reasonably well-stocked. It’s missing a few of the apps that I’ve heard people rave about for the iPad, but I don’t think that will be a huge hindrance. The web browser works–it will take a few days to render full judgement. The speakers are freaking awesome: this little thing puts out better sound than just about any laptop I’ve ever heard, and it’s loud enough to fill a medium-sized room.
My biggest problem for it was that I couldn’t find the e-mail app. After an hour and a half of playing around, I turned the Fire off and it began to update. And once it had re-booted, there was my e-mail app, right where it was supposed to be. D’oh. Perhaps Amazon should have added that to their tiny instruction card: “Please allow the Fire to update before pulling your hair out searching for the missing e-mail app.”
[Top]I don’t want to be that guy
You know, the guy who only posts about how ebooks are changing the world for the better and in the future all writers will poop gold bricks.
Here are two articles I came across today that articulate the two sides of the Amazon argument better than I can (or want to):
Is Amazon Short-Changing Authors?
It’s a fascinating article. Contrast the tone of the headline and the copy with the actual content. The tone is one of fear and mistrust, even though the quotes are overwhelmingly positive about Amazon and e-publishing. I would almost suspect that this was a propaganda piece by Big Publishing except that it’s from PBS, and I’ve heard very similar fear-laced concerns from other established authors.
This post on Konrath’s blog almost seems like a direct response to the above:
The Bogeyman and the Axe Murderer
I am watching this paradigm shift in writing and distribution and publishing with much curiosity. I am very optimistic about the new opportunities for writers, though wary of the hyperbole, and sad to see the paper-based book trade that I’ve known my whole life disappear. (For those who say that books will never go away, I agree, but it will be more like how vinyl has never gone away–in ten years, I predict that paper books will only exist as fetish items for people like me who love the feel and smell of the “real” thing. Normal people will read their books on Kindles and iPads, and think I’m weird for paying $50 for dead trees.) So no, I haven’t drank the kool-aid, but I see the writing on the wall. And this change could be very beneficial for writers–if we can seize the moment.
[Top]Is there anybody in here?
I don’t think anyone reads this blog but the spambots.
Speaking of which, how does that work? I’ve gotten a handful of spam comments over the last several months. How do they find me? I suppose I could do some research and find out, but I’d rather just pose the question and ponder an internet filled with tiny obsessed subroutines, spreading their seeds far and wide.
In the future, when the internet becomes self-aware, as science fiction and Ray Kurzweil have taught me is inevitable, the entity is going to be an overgrown spambot trying to convince us that we’ve won the lottery, Bill Gates owes us money, a pill can enlarge our anatomy, and that cheap meds are a click away. Perhaps it has already happened.
[Top]Chrysalis is now on the Nook
Barnes & Noble finally accepted that my tax ID was legit, and Chrysalis is now available on the Nook. And it remains available on the Kindle, if that’s your poison.
Now I suppose I have to go out and find some way to market this thing, eh? Not to mention finishing another book–which is so close I can taste it. And it tastes a lot like stale cigarettes, so I’d like to be done with it already.
[Top]What will the ruins of Facebook look like?
Just read a rather interesting article, The Ruins of Dead Social Networks. It brought back memories of sitting in my college dorm, searching through text file lists of BBS’s and dialing them up on a screechy 2400 baud modem to see what they had. Mostly, I was downloading files. Though there was socializing in those days as well, my virtual social life was spent on the larger national pay services. My “social networks,” in the current sense, were on GEnie (where a lot of science fiction authors hung out before the internet was the web & where some little known SF and TV writer announced “That Which Cannot Be Named”–later revealed to be Babylon 5) and, even further back, in high school, on the Commodore 64 network, QLink. I still remember when there was a mass exodus from GEnie to that new upstart (and supposedly much better) America Online, before they became merely an abbreviation, AOL.
Ah, nostalgia.
From the above article, here’s a link to someone who is trying to archive a lot of the old text files from the BBS days: Textfiles.com. Though I wasn’t directly involved in that scene, it still brings a twinge of vicarious nostalgia.
I guess if you’re looking for a moral, it’s just this: don’t get too attached to your Facebooks and your Twitters. Maybe they have reached a critical mass that makes them too big to fail. But the ruins of social networks littering the past suggests their time is limited.
[Top]Video Games don’t kill people…
Don’t study the video game, study the player
No kidding. It’s nice to see research catching up to common sense.
[Top]The Con Funk
The cruise was wonderful, and I had a really great Dragon*Con. Both recharged my creativity, and I was raring to go… until Monday afternoon when I had to drive home from Atlanta. A normally four hour drive turned into seven hours of hell, with pouring rain and a headache that would not stop. And now, the weather has turned cold and with it I’ve come down with my usual sore throat. Dunno what the science is behind it, but any change in the outdoor temperature, from cold to hot or vise versa tends to aggravate my sinuses and thus my throat. So not really suffering from post-con funk or ennui this year, but my body is having a non-essential inflammatory response anyway…
Which is all a long way of saying: I was planning on updating this blog fairly regularly from now on, but it’s gonna have to wait a bit longer. At least for anything substantive.
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