Kindle Fire

by Patrick 18. December 2011 15:10

Got a Kindle Fire this weekend and have to say, despite all the negative feedback, I'm impressed.

I own a 1G and 2G iPad and a Motorola Xoom so the tablet space isn't new. But comparing the Kindle Fire to either of these is just not apples to apples. At $200 the Kindle Fire is a steal. You get an Android 2.3 customized UI by Amazon in a 7" form factor.

The feel of it is nice, it feels just right for me. The Amazon UI is a bit too simple for me, but I was able to get it set up and working easy. The Amazon App store just doesn't contain all the apps I want. So I ventured out to Root the Fire and install the Android Marketplace and various other apps.

Rooting it was easy, but it broke Amazon's Instant Video. Unrooting or hiding the root solved this issue. Was able to get everything installed and I really like the performance now.

Battery life is good, not great, but good. The screen is bright and very readable. Movies looked really good, especially considering I compress mine to fit on iphones.

Streaming is what you are supposed to do with this thing, since its internal storage is about 6 gigs. So that means all your music has to be uploaded to Amazon cloud. This process sucked. The uploaded allows you to only choose albums, not artists or specific songs. I hated it so bad, I wanted google music back. So I installed google music and that worked so much better. Still, the google music uploader only allows you to upload playlists.

Ultimately, I am really enjoying this hackable Kindle Fire. Its been fun to play on it and hack around and see what the community does with it.

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Tech

Windows Phone 7 Mango

by Patrick 18. December 2011 14:59

Well, I got a Samsung Focus S to play around with this weekend and test the windows phone 7 OS out. Overall, I liked it, but I can't switch from iOS just yet.

UI

The "Metro" UI is actually quite nice, I found it easy to use and find everything. My biggest gripe is lack of customization beyond just the basic moving around of things. I can't find the battery percentage at the top, have to dig fifteen menus deep to get at it.

Email

I love the email app, finally someone gives me a way to see only unread emails, only flagged emails, only important (!) emails in my exchange outlook. The linked inboxes are cool too, even though I finally got that on iOS.

Social

The phone is clearly aimed at social media users, and the integration is really good. Of course its lacking any Google+ integration. Not a big deal, but its easy to set up and easy to use. Can easy send pictures to multiple social media sites. Only biggest issue is you can't easily switch between multiple users on different sites.

Issues

Have to use the Zune software on my computer to load music. I hate the zune software, why can't I just copy my music over, or why can't I download music from my skydrive?

No VPN??? Really Microsoft? Really? I can't believe you released a mobile OS without any VPN support! This is absurd!

App prices are off the chart. Sure I get xbox live integration, but nothing too impressive here.

No Hulu? Again, Really? This isn't rocket science, get hulu on your OS!

Development

I'm a native visual studio user, so I found creating apps using XAML very familar, but no sockets connections! This means any non web based connections are out of the question. I wanted to write a simple app to query my Control4 system. Already had a cool C# desktop app, figured it would be easy... Nope. The SDK lacks a lot of core .NET features.

Overall

I want to like this OS, but I can't. I like the phone, despite bad battery life. The camera is good, the screen is ok, a bit gray in the whites for me. Ultimately, it will be another version or two before they win me over again. For now, I'm going back to my iPhone 4, I miss my iPhone 4.

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