A Day of (Kindle) Fire

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Monday, Nov. 21

8:50 PM — My buddy just dropped off his Kindle Fire. Major props to him for letting me borrow it. Time for some whiskey? I THINK SO!

9:01 PM — The box is very similar to what my $79 Kindle came in — simple, clean. Setup was pretty simple. I powered the device on, entered my WiFi password, and logged into my Amazon account.

9:02 PM — The power button is on the bottom of the tablet (while it’s held in portrait mode). I’ve hit it about a six times already, putting the device to sleep while using it.

9:45 PM — Spent about half an hour playing around on the Fire, sitting on the couch. I like how the Books, Music, etc hubs show “On Device” and “In the Cloud.” It’s a clever way of showing what’s been purchased, but not downloaded. Speaking of downloads, I’ve added several free apps to the device, and every time Amazon emails me about it.

9:50 PM — Heading to bed. Just checked my RSS feeds via Google’s mobile Reader webpage. Feels pretty 2007-ish.

Tuesday, Nov. 22

9:30 AM — At the office after sitting in traffic forever. The Kindle Fire didn’t seem to mind, as it was nestled in my backpack next to my iPad 2, which will be off all day.

9:40 AM — Here’s a stack of the gear currently on my desk, including my 13" MacBook Pro, iPad 2, the Fire, my $79 Kindle and my iPhone 4:

IMG 4105

The Fire is the same width as my e-ink Kindle and is just a little bit taller.

9:55 AM — I really dislike the 7" screen size. In portrait, it feels awkward, and in landscape, there’s not enough screen real estate to really see anything — especially if the keyboard is on the screen.

10:26 AM — The more I play with the Android apps that run on this thing, the more I think about the Classic Environment. It feels like these apps are just taped to the back of the Fire’s UI, just because someone realized this thing had to have some apps at the last moment.

10:31 AM — I meant to mention this last night, but I got my iCloud email working over IMAP in the built-in email client with no issues. However, I’m without my contacts and calendars. Oh well.

Screw This — I’m Done

I can’t take it anymore. I’m already tired of this device.

Look, here’s the thing: the Kindle Fire sucks unless you are earlobe-deep in Amazon’s ecosystem. Even then, the hardware and software aren’t stellar. It’s cheaply made with a small screen and a heavy chassis. The software is laggy and crashes at times. The weird UI means apps are never where you left them.

It’s just like the e-ink Kindles — a front-end to Amazon’s stores. (And unlike the e-ink versions, reading on this thing sucks, since it is a backlit LCD.) This thing isn’t an iPad killer. Hell, it isn’t even a Generic Android Tablet killer.

Now, I like my e-ink Kindle. But it isn’t trying to be anything but an e-reader. The Fire has a serious identity crisis, and as such, it isn’t good at anything, really.

Billions

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Nilay Patel:

HP just reported its Q4 2011 financial results, and although the company managed an overall profit, the real news is in the webOS numbers: HP spent a big chunk of $3.3 billion this year killing the webOS group and absorbing Palm’s falling value. Considering the $1.2 billion HP spent on Palm in the first place, and it’s clear that HP’s blown through at least a couple billion in its failed webOS experiment — an experiment that’s still awaiting a final resolution from new CEO Meg Whitman, who’s promised employees a decision on their fates sometime within the next few weeks.

Damn.

Ultrabooks Are The New Netbooks

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This Is My Confession

I owned three netbooks back in the day. The first was the original netbook, the Eee PC 701 4G. While the “4G” had nothing to do with its network connection, the machine wasn’t half bad.

It was all the way bad.

I later moved on to the HP Mini 1000 and then the Dell Mini 9. The HP had a fairly decent keyboard, and the Dell Mini 9 ran OS X 10.5 Leopard like a champ.

Fundamentally, however, all three of these notebooks had the same problems — small screens, crappy keyboards and trackpad and Windows XP. But more on all of this in a bit.

The Tablet Killed the Netbook Star

As netbooks trudged on from the 701’s 2007 launch, they slowly became more fragmented. Screen sizes slowly grew, the Intel Atom processor showed up in most models, and some even eventually got Windows Vista.

What a winner.

When Apple announced the iPad in January 2010, Steve Jobs discussed the netbook:

Jobs was right. While the netbook was already on decline by early 2010 — at least in mindshare. The iPad, however, seems to have just about killed them off.

This All Seems Familiar

Starting this quarter, Intel has been pushing “ultrabooks” on to the market. These machines are all built around a set of specifications from the chip maker. They all have SSDs, CULV Intel processors and 11.6 or 13.3-inch displays.

Sounds familiar? It should — mainly because the MacBook Air wasn’t around in 2007 for PC companies to copy.

Now, It Really Seems Familiar

Here’s Joanna Stern at The Verge, reviewing the Acer Aspire S3:

“Ugh, this keyboard!” That may not have been the very first sentence I typed on the chiclet panel, but it was surely amongst the second or third. As I mentioned before, the plastic deck feels shockingly cheap, and the matte keys sprouting out of it are no different; they are flimsy, mushy, and grossly flat. The spacing on the keyboard is perfectly adequate, but why Acer had to make the arrow keys smaller than a peanut (literally) is beyond me.

[…]

It probably won’t come as a shock that the 3.5 x 2.5-inch touchpad similarly suffers from quality issues. It too feels overly plasticy and chintzy like a Fisher Price toy. But I am happy to report the responsiveness of the multitouch surface is better than I expected — I didn’t encounter any jumping cursors and two-finger scrolling was relatively smooth for a Windows laptop.

The S3 isn’t the most expensive or the nicest ultrabook on the market. However, it was one of the first, and one of the cheapest. To be honest, its low price appeals to the people who walk into a Best Buy to buy a computer without any research.

The problems Stern outlines in her review — and other ultrabook reviews — aren’t new to the tiny, Windows-based notebook world.

Is It All About Power?

While ultrabooks may look and feel like netbooks, the processors tucked inside have improved over their ancestors. Coupled with SSDs, these new machines are even faster. However, PC builders can’t seem to get the rest of the package right.

Shocking, right?

CaptureNotes [Sponsor]

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CaptureNotes 2 is more than just a note-taking app for the iPad. It lets you record audio while you type.

While there might be other apps that let you take notes and record, CaptureNotes 2 brings an entirely new feature to the experience: Flags.

Flags are intelligent bookmarks, allowing you to place specific marks in time during a recording to follow up on in later review. For example, if you were using CaptureNotes in a class, you could mark things like test questions, text references, follow-up requests, or even make your own custom flag set. In a meeting at work, you could mark action items to follow up on.

When it comes time to study for your test or compile your to-do list, you can sort notes by flag type, taking you back to that specific piece of audio recording and notes.

Note-taking is also available on imported PDFs and email sessions. CaptureNotes lets you store your binders and notebooks on Dropbox.

CaptureNotes 2 was recently selected as app of the week at TiPB, and is sale to celebrate. Capture everything at school, work, or home with CaptureNotes 2.

Marco, on the Kindle Fire

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Ouch:

I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games.

In practice, it’s none of these. Granted, I’ve only spent two days with it, so I can’t share any long-term impressions. But I’m honestly unlikely to have any, because this isn’t a device that makes me want to use it more. And that’s fatal.

What’s on my Home Screen

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IMG 0402

Row 1

The top row is pretty close to stock. Messages, Calendar and Photos are all in their default positions. Camera+ took over for the system’s camera app a long time ago. I like the filters and sharing options, but most importantly, it is faster than iOS’ app, at least on my 4.

Row 2

  • Music is pretty self-explanatory. I’ve got iTunes Match turned on.
  • Instacast is fantastic. Syncing with iTunes to update podcasts seems super old-fashioned after using this app. I listen to a bunch of shows while driving around, and this app is a game-changer.
  • PlainText is a universal Dropbox text editor. I gave up Simplenote earlier this year to simplify my setup, and PlainText made that possible. (On the desktop, I access my Dropbox-based files via nvALT.
  • I’m somewhat of a weather nerd. I love radars, dew points and storm warnings. After lots of testing, I settled on My-Cast as my iPhone weather app of choice.

Rows 3

  • My life is inside OmniFocus. I’m not even kidding.
  • While it is $3 more than the free, first-party Twitter client, Tweetbot is worth the money. It’s got really smart push notification, a great design and a healthy dose of personality. I wish they guys would make an iPad version.
  • Reeder is the Google Reader client not only for the iPhone, but the iPad and Mac, too. It’s not without good reason — Reeder is fast, ties into sharing services and has a great icon.
  • While I use Instapaper more on my iPad than on my phone, it might be my favorite iOS app. I send tons of stuff to the service, and I love having it ready to read if I have a moment.

Row 4

I keep this row empty. It makes my phone less overwhelming to look at, and it gives me a nice place to slide over to the others screens.

The Dock

Nothing too exciting here. Settings has lived in my Dock for years, and I just can’t bring myself to change it.