Kindle Fire, Review and Rant

Not expressly gaming related but perhaps blogging related.

As an early birthday present I received a Kindle Fire. We are planning a trip to China this summer and my wife thought it would be nice for me to have it on the plane.

I spent some time agonizing about whether to get a Droid tablet or the Fire, but decided that since I do a fair amount of business with Amazon already it was worth it to buy the Kindle.

Things I like:

It's light, and fairly sturdy. I have a case cover for it and have so far dropped it once with no effects. The battery seems to last pretty long, a few hours at a go if watching video, a little longer if reading books or web surfing. Ease of downloading and installing apps, books etc. It is very easy to load things onto the kindle. Most of it is done through Amazon, but you can do it as an external drive. I have loaded all of my Two Hour Wargames titles and now have a way to bookmark where I am in each rule set easily. Watching movies on Netflix. I have taken to watching Netflix in bed with the headphones on. A 7" screen on the belly is about the same as a 42" screen across the room.

Things I don't like:

So far neither of the browsers work with blogger. Some of you may have received notifications of comments from me only to find no comment. It will let me comment on a blog, it shows up on the blog in the browser, but is never seen again. The included browser "Silk" is a little slow and most people seem to hate it. Dolphin HD and Maxthon are two recommended replacements. I've been using Maxthon now and it seems a little better than Silk. Of course when I tried to post this using it blogger said the browser was not supported and I could only type the title and not the body of the post. Which leads me to the last issue which is the App store. Why oh why does amazon limit the apps? The choices for things like browsers is really limited, Maxthon was the only available browser, for instance. I was also hoping to be able to buy Elder Sign: Omens for the Fire. No soap. You can apparently side load from another android device but get a glitch that messes with the clock turn making the game un-winnable.

So I think overall positive, just a few things that are annoying and perhaps would be issues with a Droid tablet as well.

So this leads me to what is the deal with blogger. I know it's free and all but there doesn't seem to be any way to address this browser support issue. If I could load chrome onto the fire I would. Why does google make all this stuff that doesn't integrate? Seems like it should.

Carry on.