Sunday, November 20, 2011

Kindle Fire - Additional Observations


I'm still just nibbling around the edges of Kindle Fire ownership. This afternoon, after #CatAvailabilityTime, I watched Season 1, Episode 1, of Dr. Who. I had grave reservations about watching video streamed over Wi-Fi (specifically, from my Wi-Fi WAP), but the experience was surprisingly pleasant. I had anticipated hiccups ("Buffering..." pop-ups) occurring every few minutes. This did not happen. The video was smooth and absolutely free of jerky hiccups. There was a problem about a third of the way through the viewing: "Network connection lost" (to paraphrase). I don't know if the problem was due to Amazon overload or my WAP's flakiness. At any rate, after a couple of minutes, I was able to resume viewing and there were no further interruptions during the 45 minutes of the Dr. Who episode.

Thanks to my extreme nearsightedness, the viewing experience was extremely immersive. I watched the show without contacts (screen about 4" away from my eyes) and wearing good quality headphones. So... my sympathy to all you folks who are not debilitatingly nearsighted.

I continue to struggle with the lack of a few critical apps on the Amazon store. Dropbox I have mentioned. I can use Google Docs as a web application, but it would be so much better as an Android app! Google has provided a pretty slick mobile web UI, but dammit--I want a native app!

I find it ironic that the Google App Store offers some pretty cool apps for interfacing with Amazon, while Amazon has yet to offer an easy way to interface with Google. ::Sigh::

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