Posted in Book Reviews on December 9, 2016
With this post, I’m taking a little break from talking about what I’m reading to talk about what I’m reading on. If you want to skip the background, just down a few paragraphs. I’ve been reading books in electronic form — mostly Kindle — for about 10 years now. I was still living in Bangkok at the time, and while the city did boast a big English language book store by that time; one that surprisingly even had a small ‘alt‘ section, the selection of gay fiction was quite limited. To get what I wanted to read required ordering books from overseas, with the resulting postage fees almost doubling the price of printed books.
Then along came tablets and phablets. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7" was very popular in Asia at the time, and when I discovered that one could actually read books on them I decided that I wanted one as well. The difference in the amount of reading I did was huge. I no longer had to measure out the amount of reading I did so that I wasn’t spending too much on books.
Over the years, I’ve stuck with the Samsung Tab. The first two were also phones. That’s not as awkward as it might sound. At the time, I was making much of my living as a travel writer, so I rarely went out without a small camera bag or courier satchel, and with headphones it didn’t really matter how big the phone was. I could leave it in the bag and just use the headset if I got a call.
Shortly after I returned to the States, the need for a phone that would fit in my pants pocket began to assert itself, so I purchased a small handset and used the Tab as just a tablet. When that device began to show its age, I replaced it with a new Tab 3 8" model.
That was a couple of years ago, and now that table was beginning to show signs that it was maybe time to think about replacing it. The battery was beginning to lose it’s charge a little too quickly and the tablet was getting a little cranky. The Android version was also getting well out of date and so most apps weren’t getting updated any more.
Having decided it was time for a new table, I naturally looked at getting the latest Samsung. However, at the time, the model that replaced the one I have now was about $300. It wasn’t crazy expensive, and it’s since gone down, but I began to wonder if it wasn’t overkill for what I needed. After all, I probably spend more than half my time using a tablet reading books. The rest of the time is reading email, checking out Facebook, and maybe a few other apps. Nothing I did really required a lot of heavy lifting or bandwidth. All of which led me to consider the Amazon Fire Tablet for the first time.
Like the Samsung Tab, the Amazon Fire is an Android-based tablet, sort of. More on that later. They have similar specifications for screen size and resolution, but the Fire lists for just $89, which of course really got my attention. So it was that I became the owner of a new Fire Tablet at the beginning of November.
Reading on the tablet is virtually the same experience as reading on my old Tabs. The Kindle app works exactly the same. The only notable difference is that the Fire also has a “blue shade” screen option which filters out the blue colors of the screen. This supposedly keeps you from getting ‘woken up’ by the blue light of the screen while you’re reading before bed. The only other minor difference in the reading experience is that the Fire shows the recent books you’ve read on the home screen. If you read several books at once, this could be quite handy.
Speaking of the home screen; while the Fire is based on the Android operating system, it’s a highly customized version of it. One of the common features of Android phones and tablets that is missing is the ability to add widgets to your home screen, to display information such as current weather, appointments, etc. The screen is effectively locked into a number of tabs such as recent, home, books, and video; effectively featuring all the products you would likely purchase from Amazon. Of course, for a lot of the products you’ve purchased Amazon is quick to point out other products you may be interested in. The selling extends to the lock screen, which always features an Amazon offer. I’ve been somewhat surprised at how little the pitches seemed aimed at me, but then I suspect that if Amazon displayed only the products related to my purchases I wouldn’t be able to bring the tablet to work. All the advertising is probably how, or why, Amazon is able to keep the price of the Fire low. It’s a selling platform for them as much as it’s a tool for you.
Other apps Because the Fire operating system is sort of a walled garden of Android, it doesn’t have Google’s Play store or all the apps you might find there. That appears to be part of its selling point: the Fire is a kid-friendly tablet with lots of parental controls that allow mom or dad to limit what their kids can use and even when they can use the tablet.
However, you will find most of the major apps that you would want, such as Facebook and Twitter. The standard email app works a lot like the Gmail app but definitely isn’t the latest and greatest version of that program. It does work well enough. You can’t install the Gmail app but you can install its useless counterpart, Inbox. The built-in web browser is called Silk. It works well enough, and has a tabbed interface like you find in Chrome or Firefox. Curiously, it defaults to the Bing search engine rather than Google. You cannot install Chrome or Firefox or any other web browser that I could think of.
Battery life is rather amazing. So far, I’ve generally used the tablet for three or four days before charging. It does seem to charge rather slowly, so I usually end up leaving it plugged in overnight, which probably means the battery life will start coming down sooner or later. Although the Fire seems a bit thicker than my old Samsung, it doesn’t feel any heavier in the hand.
Although I miss a few minor things about the Samsung tablet, given the price point (at the time), I’m happy with the Fire tablet.
The Amazon Fire HD 8 Tablet is available from Amazon.
