On Christmas Day 2011, I opened two gifts from my wife. One
was a first generation Kindle – the little gray electronic book reader that
allows you to magically carry around hundreds of books wherever you go. It’s only
4 1/2 inches wide and will fit in your front pants pocket. Using my Amazon Kindle
device, I can browse, borrow or buy and download one of several million
electronic e-books, plus newspapers, magazines and other digital media through
a wireless connection to Amazon’s Kindle store.
So far, I have bought 317 books. I have read most of them,
and the others, well, let’s say I read far enough to know it was time to stop. Most
e-books cost anywhere from 99 cents to $15 or more. Some of them were actually free,
but even at that price weren’t worth the time it took to download them. I mean,
hey, you can’t win ‘em all.
The other gift I got that year was a first generation Kindle
Fire, which took the device to a whole new level of audio and video
possibilities. With the Fire, I can still read my books, but I can also download
a Netflix app and watch movies and TV shows on a 7-inch screen that I can hold
in one hand. I can get apps for TV networks; visit news, sports and weather
sites; download internet music; and play all kinds of games. I can sit in a
doctor’s office and play Yahtzee or Hearts while waiting to be called, or read Facebook
and Twitter posts, among other things.
“I didn’t know which one to get you,” my wife confessed that
Christmas morning six years ago, “so I bought them both.”
It’s good that she did, as it turns out, because the Kindle
Fire with its glass face is impossible to view in the sunlight. When I look at
it on a sunny day, all I see is me looking down at me. The original Kindle, meanwhile,
has a matte finish on its face that is sunshine friendly, so I use it to read
outside if reading is all I want to do.
Both devices are rechargeable, but I discovered after a
couple of years that the recharging cable for the Fire no longer fits snugly
into the port, so it’s very difficult to recharge. You have to jiggle it around
and get it aligned just right or it won’t charge at all. It reminds me of the
old days when we had to manipulate the rabbit ears on our TV set to get the
Pittsburgh channels. For that reason, I bought a new Fire tablet last year. (It’s
called Amazon Fire now. They’ve dropped the Kindle name entirely, although I’m
not sure why.)
Anyway, moving right along, when I opened Christmas gifts
from my wife this year, I got another surprise. What to my wondering eyes should
appear but another new Amazon Fire – this one being the next generation of the
device with a 10-inch screen that streams movies and TV shows in glorious HD
and has stereo sound so good that when I’m watching a show, I think people are
talking in the next room…but it’s only the background voices coming from the
Fire.
This one is really what I’d call a tablet. It’s not quite as
large as an iPad but the screen is three inches larger than the old Fire. It’s
almost like carrying a small TV set around and I can no longer operate it with
one hand. It has new features, too, including 2 GB RAM, Dolby Audio, 10-hour
battery life and something called “hands-free Alexa.” (Given today’s environment
of sexual misconduct, I’m not touching that one with, well, I’m just not
touching it.) There’s other stuff that I haven’t figured out yet...and it no
longer fits in my pants pocket.
So now I have four “Kindle-type” devices in varying colors
and sizes and, of course, they all have slightly different charging cords (I
mean, why should I expect Amazon to make things easy for me?) I like the new
one a lot, which confirms my wife’s theory that I didn’t know I needed it until
I got it. Like the microwave oven, the digital camera and the smart phone, I suppose.
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| The Fire Family |
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