All Fired Up

I ran into the Head of Dietary Services today at my mom's nursing home.  The first thing he said when he saw me was, "Hey, guess what I got for Christmas!"

"A Kindle Fire," I replied.

"Yes," he said, looking surprised that I'd guessed so quickly.

"I got one, too," I laughed.  "Aren't they great?"

"I love it," he answered.  "Well, I just had to tell you because you're the one who got me started with Kindles in the first place."

Yes, I had.  He'd been at a caregivers' meeting I'd attended last year and he saw me sitting there reading my Kindle before the meeting started.  One thing led to another and soon I was extolling the virtues of e-readers and the Kindle, in particular.  He had his own Kindle within a week and he got his wife one later that year.

I'm telling you, once you've used a Kindle, you are quickly hooked.   Goodness, I'll even expand that to include Nooks.  These e-readers are just fantastic little techno-doodads.

There's no better illustration of the passionate nature of e-reader aficionados than an obituary I read in the paper yesterday.  It said, in part....

   ".....loved to read anything she could get her hands on.  After she purchased her Kindle, she never left home without it."

Amen, Sister!

The Mystery of Fire

Several days ago we headed off with a full van and kids in tow to Ohio to see Laura's extended family and to transfer some belongings that we'd been storing here to family heading back to Texas.  But first we made a quick detour to the neighborhood post office to mail off some packages.  I dashed into the PO, did my business and headed back to the car where I settled into my seat and took out my Kindle Fire, ready to lose myself in a good book.  Yikes!  The Fire appeared to be as dead as a doornail, even though it had worked fine and had almost a full charge just the night before.

"Stop," I yelled  in a panic.  "We have to swing back by the house so I can get another Kindle.  There's no way I'm making a long car trip without something to read."

We backtracked and I ran into the house, grabbed my Kindle Touch and its charger and dashed back to the van and off we went.  The Touch was working perfectly.

When we got to our destination and had brought everything into the house, I was griping about the Fire not working and gave it another try and lo and behold, it worked perfectly.  What in the world?

The next day before we headed off to the next family's home, I checked out my Kindle Fire once again and it was working fine.  Great!

We carried our luggage out to the car, got in and started off.  I pulled out the Fire and took it out of "sleep" mode.  What in the world?  Again it was blank and appeared to be dead as a doornail.  I was beginning to think that just the slightest bit of cold temps were causing it to lose its charge.  Back I went to my trusty Kindle Touch.

At the next house, we unpacked and I visited with folks for awhile and then thought to check the Kindle Fire.  Voila!  It turned on without a hitch.  What was happening?  It worked fine that night and yet again, passed a quick test the following morning.  This time, I put it in my purse and carried it out to the car that way, thinking it would stay warmer in there, rather than in a computer bag.

We hopped in the car, waved our goodbyes and started off for home.  I took some sips of coffee, slipped off my shoes and pulled out the Kindle Fire.  Yup, you guessed it.  Nothing, nada, zilch!  Now I was seriously getting perturbed.  I envisioned having to call up Amazon Tech Services and go over the whole crazy story.  OK, if the cold was the problem, maybe I could speed up the warming process.  I slipped the Fire between my legs.  The Commander glanced over at me and rolled his eyes.

"I'm trying to warm it up, " I attempted to explain.

Didn't work.  I unzipped my coat and put it inside my jacket and zipped it back up.  Surely it would warm up against my body.  Nope!

Alright.  Time for the heavy artillery!  I turned on the seat warmer and slipped it under my thighs.  If that didn't warm it up, I was ashamed of the darn thing.  After a suitable period of time, I tried to bring it out of its deep sleep.  Nothing doing!

In frustration, I pushed the button again and again.  I noticed that a green light was coming on at the bottom of the Kindle when I'd push the button but still nothing was showing up on the screen.  All of a sudden, I thought I detected a faint glimmer of some words on the screen.  I whipped off my glasses and peered at the screen.  It said, "Do you wish to turn off your device?"  Turn it off?  Heck, I just wanted to turn it ON!

I touched the "Cancel" button and lo and behold, my screen lit up and my Fire was lit up like a ...well, like a Fire should be.  Hmmm, a faint niggling suspicion was starting to form at the back of my brain.  I slipped my glasses with clip-on sunglasses back on.  Huh?  The screen was suddenly completely black.  I took off the clip-on sunglasses.  The Fire was on and the images were right there.  On/off.....on/off.....Every time I put on my clip-on sunglasses, the screen went completely black.  Every time I took them off, my screen was on and  working great.

Ah-ha!  Apparently, my Kindle Fire hadn't been malfunctioning at all.  The culprit was my clip-on sunglasses.  They were polarized in such a way that they completely blocked out the Kindle Fire's screen.  Of course, since I had them on when I was outside and in the car, I was only seeing a blank screen but since I didn't have them on inside, the Fire would seemingly come back to life once we were inside a house.  Mystery solved.  I am SO relieved and boy, am I glad that I didn't have to confound Amazon (and reveal my total idiocy) by calling Tech Services.

Putting Out the Fire

My Kindle Fire arrived yesterday and I've been playing with it, as you can expect.  I promised you that I'd post some reviews of it for you and I'm going to give them to you in manageable bits, as I discover what all it will do and how it performs.  The picture above is one of the opening screens after you press the tiny power button on the bottom.  You use this button to power the Fire up, turn it off, put it to sleep, and wake it up.  Once you've got it "fired up," you swipe the yellow arrow to the left and you are taken to your Home screen.

Your Home screen will have a rotating display of icons representing the latest apps and books that you've opened.  On the bottom shelf will be things you've "pinned" and want to have remaining there (until you remove them).  The ones you see are ones that Amazon had placed there for me when it was shipped.  I haven't gotten around to customizing it yet.

The first thing I did after powering it up was start downloading some of my books onto it.  When you press "Books" at the top, it gives you the option of viewing either the books you have in the "Cloud" (in other words, your archive) or on the "Device."  You can then sort them by Author, Title, or Recent.  Since I have lots of books in my Cloud, it was easier for me to do a search and then select the books to download that way.

One other way you can customize how these books are displayed is by choosing either "Grid View" or "List View."  in the first picture of my Cloud books, you were looking at it displayed as a Grid view.

This is how it looks as a List View.  Those little down arrows are what you would press to download the book onto your device.

I couldn't remember what "Pulse" was so I decided to explore that.  Once I opened it up, I realized that it is similar to "Flipboard" which I use on my iPad.  It is a customized reader where you can pick and choose what blogs or news feeds to follow.  Instead of "flipping" pages, it has a "timeline" appearance which is nice and you just swipe left or right to see the pictures and small synopsis of each story.  To read something in greater detail, you just select it.

I did a little searching within Pulse to see what feeds and blogs were available.  I was delighted to see that Google Reader was there and it let me log right into it and then it displayed all the feeds/blogs that I currently follow in Google Reader.  I simply select the ones I want to add to Pulse by pressing the "+" sign by the ones I want.

I had no problem logging into Facebook and following along with the posts.  It is set up pretty much just like Facebook on your smartphones.  As I was typing a status update, I noticed that Kindle Fire is constantly coming up with words it anticipates that I might be typing.  To use one of the words, you just touch the one you want and it pops into whatever you were typing AND puts a space after the word so you don't even have to do that.  This feature was a little distracting at first but it hasn't taken me long to become much more comfortable with it and to start using it more and more.

Of course, I HAD to add a few apps right away.  Amazon had already put some on my shelves just waiting for me to download them, if I so chose.  But what I really wanted first was Netflix and Comics.  It was getting too late last night to search for more.  I did notice that quite a few of the games I had on my Kindle 3 did NOT download to the Kindle Fire.  It said something about them not being compatible or able to be downloaded onto this device.  I'm assuming that their codes need to be rewritten for the Fire.  So app developers, let's get cracking, OK?

Speaking of the Comics app, here is what a page from a comic looks like on my Kindle Fire.  Cool, eh?  You can zoom in if you need to, of course.  The colors are wonderful.  I just love being able to read comics on an e-reader.

The only glitch I've had so far with my new Kindle Fire happened last evening.....LATE last evening.  I was ready to head to bed and wanted to turn off the wireless.  I could not get that wireless to turn off for love nor money.  The instructions said that you just have to "toggle" on or off.  I know that I was trying to swipe to the right, since that is how I would interpret toggling with that type of visual display.  It stayed firmly in the "On" position.  Now I swear I tried poking the Off button too but maybe I didn't.  It WAS late.  Finally I just turned the Kindle completely off.

First thing this morning I called Kindle support.  Let me just say that you can access support by going to Settings and then picking "Help & Feedback" which is the first choice.  A screen comes up with a list of topics under FAQ & Troubleshooting but you can also choose "Contact Customer Service."  I chose that and it was a very simple thing to indicate a general topic for my problem and then to press either "Call me now" or "Call me in five minutes."  I chose the "Call me Now" button and in less than a minute, my phone rang and I had Customer Service on the line.  I felt kind of stupid telling her my problem and even dumber when she said "Press the word 'Off.'"  I did this and immediately the Off was highlighted and my wireless was now turned off.  I don't know what happened but it has worked like a charm ever since.  I was giddy with delight (and probably lack of carbohydrates) since it was 7:00 a.m. and I couldn't thank the service rep enough.  If I was nitpicking, I would say the Amazon folks should have designed the "on" and "off" as radio buttons so you would intuitively know you needed to press them, instead of swiping them.

That's it for this first part of my Kindle Fire review.  I'm really enjoying it.  It is every bit as responsive as my Apple iPad.  Until next time.....I'm off to play with Fire.