I sideloaded the Dolphin browser on mine, and it seems to be a huge improvement over the stock browser.
I’m pretty happy with it so far. Only real complaint I have is the absence of Swype.
Question: My daughter wants to move some of her pics and music from her laptop onto her Fire. She plugged the Fire into her laptop via the USB cord, and it did the whole install device, etc. but then it never showed up on her notebook.
Is there a “recommended” process for doing this beyond just plugging it into the laptop?
Question: My daughter wants to move some of her pics and music from her laptop onto her Fire. She plugged the Fire into her laptop via the USB cord, and it did the whole install device, etc. but then it never showed up on her notebook.
Is there a “recommended” process for doing this beyond just plugging it into the laptop?
Is there any way to force the software update? In the settings, the update button seems to be disabled.
The cord the Fire comes with is “charge only” - at least ours was and it seems to be one of the larger complaints (that isn’t “the iPad is bettar!!!”). However, I used the cord that came with my regular Kindle and the Fire was visible as you would expect for copying files.
Yes, you can always download the 6.2.1 update at:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/kindle-fire-updates/update-kindle-6.2.1_D01E_3103920.bin
Copy (sideload) the file to the kindleupdates folder.
Touch Quick Settings, More (+), Device, Update Your Kindle.
Got the info from this Kindle forums thread:
http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=TxX1SHEDN5H70X
I have now spent 3 days with my Fire.
It really IS a solid tablet. I updated my Facebook while watching a movie at home last nite. I read this forum using Taptalk. I read through my twitter account, did some internet looking up, got up this morning and read USA today with my coffee, checked my email, sent some email and then dropped it in my back pack and went off to work. Played a couple of Scrabble rounds with my mother in law. If I have some free time at lunch I may continue watching Tital AE on streaming Netflix.
There are some cons- minor but annoying. The power switch- why is it not recessed. Flipping it 180 degrees has worked on everything I do, but there are apparently some apps that don’t allow it and and sometimes I just forget. It restarts very fast but it is definitely an annoyance.
UI…I am getting used to it but I am not a total fan. A long list of apps in the order I last opened them is, well pretty lame. I like pages or folder so I can organize my links. I don’t want my USA Today link next to my Angry Birds link…how am I supposed to find things- and since the order continually changes, it doesn’t help. The menu on top does help to some degree but not completely.
I do not read books on this- I have a Nook. That said, I grabbed a couple of comic books via the Comic X app- fantastic. A bit small but easy to zoom if you have old eyes like me. Great color and a pretty spiffy app.
So if you want a tablet and only have 200 bucks- really you can’t go wrong.
I want a tablet I can keep the PDF versions of my Pathfinder books in for playing D&D. One of my players tried to do it with his iPad but the PDF reader apps all sucked terribly and the books were practically unusable. The kindle fire seems to perform better but the screen is small and makes it hard to read dense text without zooming in.
I haven’t had time to give it the full treatment so I’ll come back later with more impressions.
That’s something the iPad tends to excel at. Maybe he tried some bad apps? There’s been talk about iPad PDFs in another thread:
For Christmas, I gave my wife a Kindle Fire, and my father-in-law got 3 of 4 of my kids Fires as well (my 3 year old got a V-Tech Innotab).
My wife just loves hers, and hasn’t touched her laptop in days. My oldest son has already rooted his, so that he can run all of the Google Apps, and my youngest son is already complaining about the Doctor Who selection on Netflix.
My 9 year old daughter spent most of the day yesterday, and so far much of the day today, listening to her Justin Beiber Pandora station while alternatively playing Angry Birds and reading books.
Just a fantastic collection of things to do with the tablets. We’re right now looking for some nice covers in a variety of colors so that people can tell which belongs to which at a glance.
Out of all of this, I’m most interested in loading up the V-Tech Innotab for my toddler, as it takes standard SD chip memory expansions, and we happen to have an extra 8GB floating around the house. With the small screen size, I can reformat all of her favorite movies and TV-shows and cram them all on that chip without difficulty.
My 70+ parents each have one now. One challenge - I can’t seem to get their Comcast email working on the default Fire mail app.
You could set them up with a free Gmail account, get it to suck and put the POP3 from Comcast, and then have the Kindle interface with the Gmail account. You could also do that with most of the other free services, I just know that the interface with Gmail is seamless.
I had trouble setting up my mother’s TDS account. Look online a bit, you kind of have to set up the ports manually as well as all of the security settings. It is kinda lame, but after some work I got it connected.
Otherwise, this thing is a hell of a tablet for 200 bucks. She already was borrowing books from the library on it, as well as downloading apps and watching music videos. Great gift.
The default email app on the Kindle Fire will only let you send as the email you check. i.e. if gmail is getting emails from other accounts and in gmail you normally reply as coming from those other accounts, the fire forces you to reply as your gmail account.
Luckily for my father (75), who got one for Christmas, he uses Yahoo for email and they have an email app he was able to download and install. Why Amazon is blocking the gmail app, I cannot fathom.
I got my parents Fires for christmas, and I think it may serve as a useful “starter tablet”. It’s kind of neat, and does some interesting stuff… but really, it’s such a tremendously crippled version of Android, that I would never recommend it to anyone who actually wants to do things with their tablet.
The fact that you can’t even customize the homescreen to any significant degree really makes it pale in my eyes compared to real android tablets.
I think you miss the point of a Fire. My parents, kids, and wife have zero interest in configuring anything on the Fire. They want to (1) read books/magazines/newspapers, (2) watch movies/TV, and to a lesser extent (3) listen to music. And most importantly, they want to know how to do (1)-(3). I’ve been told many times that “I don’t care about the settings button, just show me where the free apps are.” And this is followed up on the second day with, “can you show me again where the free apps are?” Or “how come when I download a free magazine app I have to pay for magazines?”
The term “root” has never been uttered in the Johnson family related to technology.
Well if you want The Ship, do something about it already! Send me a PM like I asked, add me on Steam, something! :-)
Alright so I put my PDF of the Pathfinder Core Rules onto my Kindle last night and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to open it. I moved around to different folders like books, documents, I made one called PDFs, nothing.
The support page and help file state the Kindle Fire can open PDFs without buying some application to read them.
Did you just copy it over by USB or did you email it to your Fire?
USB my friend.