Holiday Gifts For Dad

Holiday Gifts For Dad. (Credit) Fickr

If you are wondering about what to your dad this year consider this one word; practicality. As fathers they need five basic things; sleep, food, comfort, practicality, and peace of mind. The new Kindle Fire Tablet will help him with the last three. He can use for so many ways in his day to day routine, and it's not a huge device at all. On top of that it is very affordable that's why it's at the top of the list of holiday gifts for dad. Check out what Laptop Mag says about

HOLIDAY GIFTS FOR DAD

This holiday season, the 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire looks like the hottest tablet on the market, with Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet nipping at its heels. There’s only one problem: These devices are eReaders with benefits, and shouldn’t be considered tablets at all.

The Nook Tablet offers the best interactive eReading experience on the market, with a selection of more than 2.5 million books and amazing features such as Read and Record, which lets parents record themselves reading each page of a book so their kids can experience it even when they’re not around. The Kindle Fire isn’t as good of an eReader, but it combines more than 1 million books with access to the company’s extensive video and music stores.

Both devices have a powerful processor, a vibrant 7-inch screens, and long battery life. But having powerful hardware doesn’t make a device a tablet. Flexibility does, the flexibility to customize your experience for content creation and communications, not just media consumption.

Because Amazon and Barnes & Noble are focusing on promoting their respective devices’ ecosystem, the Nook and Kindle also have a slew of limitations that prevent them from providing the full tablet computing experience.

• App Selection: Neither tablet supports Google’s Android Market, opting instead to provide their own, smaller selections of custom-approved apps. Amazon claims to have thousands of apps for the Kindle, but strangely doesn’t even make all the apps in its own Android apps store available for its tablet. Barnes & Noble has only 1,000 apps with a few really glaring omissions—Raging Thunder is the only hardcore game. Yes, you can easily side-load apps on the Kindle Fire, and there’s an unsupported hack for doing it on the Nook, but most users don’t want to resort to that.
• Task Switching: Though both tablets have enough processing power to run several apps at the same time and an Android OS that supports true multitasking, their custom UIs make it way too difficult to switch between programs.
  On newer versions of Android, there’s a Recent Apps button at the bottom of every screen that lets you see thumbnails of all running programs and choose between them without leaving the app you’re in. On older versions of Android, you can switch between the most recent six apps—open or closed—by long-pressing the home button. In BlackBerry’s good-looking—but rarely used—PlayBook OS, you can swipe up from any page to see a list of window-like cards for every open app.
  To switch tasks on the Kindle Fire, you have to hit the software-based home button, which isn’t always visible (the keyboard covers over it, for example), go back to the home screen, and then flip through the dizzying carousel interface until you see the icon for the app you left. The Nook is a bit better because it has a physical home button and its home screen has lots of shortcuts instead of the carousel, but you still have to go home to get anywhere.
• Little Room for Customization: A true tablet is like Burger King; it lets you have it your way. With regular Android, you can rearrange your shortcuts on your various home screens, change your wallpaper, and add a slew of widgets. You can also install third-party app launchers such as ADW, an app that allows you to choose from any of 150 custom themes. The Kindle Fire offers none of these conveniences. In its defense, the Nook does allow you to change its wallpaper and to add shortcuts to its three home screens. However, you can’t drag these shortcuts around, can’t add widgets, and can’t install a launcher.
• No Alternate Keyboards/Keyboard Docks: Most serious tablet users have a virtual keyboard they prefer to the stock Android keyboard. All real Android tablets support the install of third-party keyboards, and many even come with alternate keyboard options such as Swype. There’s no way to switch keyboards on either the Fire or the Nook, and neither one offers a keyboard dock for serious data entry.
• Lame E-mail Clients: Neither eReading tablet comes with Google’s Gmail app, and their built-in e-mail apps offer the minimum functionality you’d expect. Neither the Fire or Nook Tablet supports Exchange natively, though you can download TouchDown, which adds Exchange features.
• No Third-Party Browsers Allowed: There’s a reason why neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble offers Firefox, Opera, Dolphin, or any of the host of superior third-party browsers available in the Android Market. They want you to focus on store-bought content, not on surfing the web. The Fire’s Silk Browser was supposed to revolutionize mobile browsing by using the power of the cloud, but on our tests, it was slow and crashed frequently. The Nook’s stripped-down browser is reasonably quick, but doesn’t offer tabs or any special features. At least the Fire offers tabs.
  Amazon offers no less than three different browsers in its general-purpose Android market, but it doesn’t make these available for the Fire. How come?
• No Cameras: If you’re one of those people who says, “I don’t plan to take photos with my tablet so I don’t need a camera on it,” I’m right there with you—up until the part where you say, “I don’t need a camera,” because cameras aren’t just for photography anymore. You need a back-facing camera to use augmented-reality apps such as Google Goggles to get information about objects, to scan QR codes or barcodes on products, to translate foreign text with Google Translate, and to scan receipts for work. Neither of these tablets offers a front-facing camera to make video calls, a concession likely made to get to such low prices.

• Few Chat/VoIP Options: You can’t get Gtalk going on either the Nook or the Kindle, and we couldn’t even find a working chat app for Nook. Forget about any kind of voice chat on the Kindle Fire, because it has no microphone. The Nook Tablet actually has a microphone, but at least for now you can’t get any VoIP apps in its app store. No Fring, ooVoo, Qik, or Skype here.
• Limited Storage: Barnes & Noble’s Nook has plenty of storage for things you buy from the Nook Store—about 12GB free for that. However, if you want to bring your own media files, you have a paltry 1GB free, though you can add a microSD card. When all is said and done, the Kindle Fire only has about 5GB and no microSD slot for expansion. Try fitting your extensive music collection, your giant powerpoints for work, or your HD home movies in that space! There’s a reason why the Fire relies so heavily on the cloud, but that only helps when you’re within Wi-Fi range.

There’s nothing wrong with accepting these trade-offs if your only goal is reading books and magazines, watching movies, listening to music, checking your favorite sites, and maybe a little casual gaming. But the minute you turn to content creation, you need a different class of device, one that justifiably costs more. The Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are good values, but they’re not true tablets.

View the original article here

With the Kindle Fire being an Amazon product, and the availability of fresh content every day, I recommend the Kindle Fire. It's the perfect holiday gift for someone; clients, employees, coworkers, men, teachers, boyfriend, kids, women, mom, and dad. There's just so many things you can do with the Kindle Fire, with all of the apps and the freedom,; you can't beat it! 
Why go through the congested traffic, you buy the Kindle Fire Here

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Kindle Fire vs Ipad: Which Is Best?

Kindle Fire vs Ipad: Which Is Best?
Credit-Flickr

Holiday shoppers will definitely be checking out tablets this year and the number one question is Kindle Fire vs Ipad: Which Is Best? Shoppers are doing their due dilligence, checking what both are offering and of course the price tag. Lots of people already have one of the tablets, perhaps a neighbor, classmate, or relative, but you may not be sure if you should buy, here's what Bloomberg News suggests which is best.

Kindle Fire vs Ipad: Which Is Best?

Nov. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Samsung Electronics Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. are joining Amazon.com Inc. in selling low-priced tablets this holiday season, stepping up efforts to grab sales from Apple Inc.’s market leading iPad.

More than two dozen devices, including Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, Lenovo’s IdeaPad A1 and Barnes & Noble Inc.’s Nook Tablet, are selling at a 30 percent to 80 percent discount to the iPad, which starts at $499.

Manufacturers of these tablets are also adding features that previously had been only available on more expensive models, pitting the devices more directly against the iPad, as well as posing a challenge to e-readers and netbooks.

Their aim is to narrow Apple’s lead in a market that could reach $77.4 billion by 2015, up from $9.6 billion last year, according to researcher Gartner Inc. In the third quarter, Apple saw its dominant share of the tablet market slip as devices running on Google Inc.’s Android software gained ground.
“Customers will be price sensitive,” Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co., said in an interview. “But there has to be functionality along with the low price to make these things sell. From the competitive perspective, all of them are inferior to the iPad. But some of these cheaper tablets will take share from the iPad.”

Sub-$400 IPad
To fend off the competition, Apple should offer the iPad at a lower price, analysts from Goldman Sachs said in a report this month.

“A sub-$400 iPad 2 with 8GB of capacity could further limit the competitive prospects of Android tablet vendors in 2012 and attract more cost-sensitive consumers,” the report said. It could also help Apple compete with lower-cost rivals whose devices now offer an array of features.

Samsung’s new $349 Galaxy Tab 7 can be used as a remote control for devices in the home. Lenovo added an always-on GPS capability to its $199 IdeaPad A1. Archos’s $349 10-inch G9 tablet has a built-in stand and a customized video store with full high-definition playback.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which comes with access to the company’s digital books and videos, could grab up to 20 percent of prospective iPad buyers during the Christmas quarter, Wolf said.

“Some consumers who would have bought an iPad will buy a Kindle,” Wolf said. “The iPad could lose a half a million in unit sales because of the Kindle.” Wolf expects Apple to sell 12.5 million iPads during the holiday quarter. Amazon will sell 5 million Kindle Fires this quarter, JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in a recent note.

Strong Start for IPad
Still, the iPad remains one of the top items on holiday shopping lists. Piper Jaffray Cos. analyst Gene Munster said yesterday that based on observations, Apple’s stores sold 14.8 iPads per hour on Black Friday, up 68 percent from last year.

In a separate report by Piper Jaffray, a survey of teens showed that 11 percent mentioned an Apple product at the top of their wish lists, up from 7 percent in 2008. Among Apple’s products, the iPhone and iPad were the most popular.

Personal computer makers, faced with slumping sales, have joined the tablet battle by offering devices at different sizes and prices. The average selling price of a tablet fell 10 percent in the past year, while the average price of a smartphone rose 20 percent, said Neil Mawston, director of global wireless at research firm Strategy Analytics Inc.

Android on the Rise
By dropping prices, Apple’s rivals have gained market share. Android-powered tablet computers accounted for 27 percent of global sales during the three-month period ending in September, jumping from 2.3 percent a year earlier, Strategy Analytics said in October. Samsung, the biggest seller of Android tablets, accounted for about 9 percent of the overall market. The iPad’s share fell to 67 percent from 96 percent.

“Customers and businesses love lower-cost devices,” Mawston said. “As prices come down, the entry-level market will grow.”

The shift to low-cost tablets could mean the death within a few years of computing categories such as netbooks and e- readers, Mawston said.

“At some point in 2012, the black-and-white e-reader is going to start to look a little bit dated,” he said. “And the tablet market is crushing the netbook market.”

Already, for every 10 tablets sold this year, researcher Canalys said five netbook or notebook computer sales are lost. Netbook sales will drop 13 percent this year, to 34 million units, Canalys said.
E-book reader sales are expected to rally through the holiday season, even amid pressure from tablets. E-reader shipments will reach 27 million units this year, more than double last year’s 12.8 million units shipped, according to researcher IDC.

Best of Both Devices
In the long term, manufacturers may develop hybrid devices that offer features of both a tablet and an e-reader, according to a report from Juniper Research. For example, a device could have a high-resolution screen for watching videos that is also designed to minimize eyestrain while reading books.
“Hybrid displays could signal the end for dedicated eReaders,” the report said.

More low-cost tablets will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Many of them will use the latest update of Android, named Ice Cream Sandwich. That version of the software, the first to be designed for both phones and tablets, may encourage developers to write more applications for the platform and increase competition in the tablet market.

“There will be a price war,” said Frederic Balay, vice president of marketing for tablet maker Archos. “Hopefully, it won’t bastardize the price seriously.”

View the original article here

You've pondering Kindle Fire vs Ipad: Which Is Best? Now you have better information to help with that choice. Honestly it depends on if you want simply a content device or do you want a tablet computer? Get the Ipad 2 if you want a computer, where you can read, send, recieve, edit, or create documents. However, if you looking to mainly do reading and watching some videos, then the Kindle Fire Tablet is the best for you.

Why wait? Buy your Kindle Fire right now:

The Kindle Fire Reader Is Ready for You!

Kindle Fire Reader

You just got your new Kindle Fire Reader and naturally you will either read a book or buy one. You'll have so many selections and one author cover it exceptionally well. Read further

Today I purchased the new Kindle Fire editions of both V for Vendetta and Sandman, Vol.1. I've been anxious to see how the new KF8 format delivers when it comes to complex graphic novels, since my current project relies entirely on its ability to render full screen color images with overlaid text effectively if it's to be successful in the Kindle format.
At left is a shot of a full panel of Sandman in the Kindle Fire's native reader. Colors are clear and vivid as expected, but the 7" screen presents text that is much too small to read. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that both pinch and zoom and horizontal orientation have inexplicably been turned off for both the titles I downloaded, so that the only way to enlarge the text is via KF8's version of Panel View. This renders graphic novels much the same way the Fire handles magazines, which is to say not well. Pinch and zoom has reached the point of being virtually synonymous with "touchscreen," so that its absence here is truly perplexing. In addition, pages load at annoying slow speeds in the Kindle Fire's reader, so that I found myself constantly swiping twice to turn a page, thinking it hadn't registered my first motion.
A further peculiarity is that the Kindle reader's guided panel view (see at right) only zooms each panel by a percentage of the original (roughly 150% or so), rather than expanding to fill the available screen from edge to edge like all the current comic apps do (including Comixology's Kindle Fire app, which I'll get to in a minute). And as you can see it does so over a dimmed out view of the full page image. I can see artistic reasons for doing this, the main one being controlled and consistent resizing of the artwork: smaller panels zoomed to full screen width can pixelate and become fuzzy with extreme expansion. And this points out the other major reason for restricting zoom, which is that it allows the use of smaller, more compressed images in what is already an extremely large file for an ebook even at these smaller image sizes (Vendetta is 87.8 Mb and Sandman 79.4).

Panel View is accessed and exited via double tapping as normal, and as usual while in the guided panel view swiping moves the zoomed-in image sequentially from one pane to the next, while swiping in full page view moves from one page to the next, albeit very slowly here. There is no menu function for turning Panel View on and off as in other apps (although it isn't needed either), but more importantly, the context menu is exactly the same as that in any other book read on the Kindle Fire, except that both the search and font resizing/typeface functions are inactive here: only the "Go To" links are available, though not surprisingly the table of contents link is grayed out for both of these books.
In Comixology - and every other comic app I have installed on my iPad 2, including Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse - there are additional menu features available for their graphic novels that the Kindle reader doesn't have, such as choices for page transitions, letterboxing (blacking out the white space at the top and bottom), and showing full pages on entering and/or exiting a new or completed page, on top of which there is built in metadata and in-app storefronts and content management. You can also generally browse through a comic in grid view (though not always), seeing an overview of the page sequence in thumbnail form, a function which serves as the graphic novel equivalent of a table of contents.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the Kindle reader's shortcomings mentioned above, the Comixology app on the Kindle Fire functions exactly the same as it does on the iPad, with the ability to pinch-and-zoom any page or panel, as well as rotating the device orientation to auto-zoom the individual panels, and including all the context menu options. As seen in the image below, the currently selected panel automatically expands to fill the available space. And more importantly, it does all this with absolutely smooth and seamless transitions regardless of the level of zoom, showing that the Kindle reader's quirks are not a shortcoming of the device hardware but a flaw in the Kindle reader software and/or format code itself.
Of course, an app is an entirely different creature than an ebook reader, which by its very nature is a much more simplified affair, designed (until now) primarily to accommodate the most basic requirements of text-based files, whereas apps can be as complex as its programmers need it to be (and their creativity and budget allows). Whoever devised the guided panel view was in my mind a deviously clever genius, and I take my hat off to them and hope they somehow find their way into a job in ebook formatting and code development.
Meanwhile, the Kindle reader app for the Fire tablet is at least a step in the right direction, and no small one at that. Although it's clunky and awkward like an old Ford Model T when set beside the sleek and regal Speedster that is the modern comics app, it's still a good beginning. While e-reader screens have finally reached the point where full color illustrated books look good - and often even stunning - the reader software and format code have got a long way to go yet to catch up with the cutting edge. With any luck the capability is there in the new KF8 and ePub3 specs and only needs the proper implementation to bring out. But only time will tell.
Still, that being said, even a PDF viewed in the Kindle Fire's reader loads in lightning fast when compared to the KF8 comics I just bought. On top of which they also allow for both orientation and zoom, as you can see from these two images of the Ring Saga pdf test file that I sideloaded into the Kindle Fire's document folder. Viewing a page in vertical orientation shows the full page by default, whereas rotating horizontally auto-zooms the page to fit the screen width, allowing for scrolling down the page and easier reading of the embedded text at a larger size. Unfortunately, of course, none of more advanced features found in the comic apps are available when viewing PDFs, nor are any of the standard text functions active, such as highlighting, built-in dictionaries, and the like, which is a common failing of this format.
This is hardly an ideal situation for those of us attempting to create full color content. While the technology is finally beginning to reach the realm of possibility, we're not there yet. Still, it's a start. Even with its limitations, this is a major advance for the Kindle reader, from black and white text with grayscale images only weeks ago to full color guided view graphic novels today (albeit clunky ones). Bold steps are being taken, and a lot of brilliant minds are hard at work, focused on this very problem. Another two years down the road and this will all be academic, I suppose. But for now it's really a major pain in my posterior.

There are so many apps that you can choose and go through. So take your time and look deeply into the apps. There are a couple of books for your Kindle Fire Reader to enjoy. Which will be the first choice?