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.

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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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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?

Kindle Fire Tablet Review-Part 2

Here's part 2 of the most complete Kindle Fire Tablet Review. In this part The Silk Bowser is covered. Then Shopping aspect is covered as it relates to Books, Music, and Movies. After that Apps and Games are covered, followed by the final Verdict. 

Silk Browser

Aside from the price tag, one of the main talking points spawned from Amazon's announcement was the new, and revolutionary Silk browser, which promised a different approach to loading web-pages, meaning you'd get to your favourite content faster.

Here's how it works in theory. You see, Amazon isn't just the world's biggest retailer, it also owns most of the internet. It's servers host an astonishing amount of the web's content.

It's massive EC2 Cloud-based computers are hence able to do a huge amount of the heavy lifting when it comes to loading web content.

Those servers will store a lot of the information about websites in a cache, meaning the Kindle Fire itself has to do less of the work the next time it brings up that page. The browser will determine the best division of labour necessary to load the page in the fastest way.

The Silk's loading method isn't without controversy. As a lot of the information is handled by Amazon's own servers, there are privacy issues at stake. It means Amazon has a record of every site you've visited, exposing your browsing habits. There's a price to pay for that extra speed.

But how does it work in practice? Well, on pages we loaded regularly, like TechRadar.com, the back-end loading functionality was able to predict regular content like the banner heads, while the rest of the content follows almost instantly. It's a very fluid experience.

In terms of the look and usability of the Silk browser, it's definitely more likable than the default Android smartphone and tablet browser, but not as smooth or intuitive as Safari for iOS 5.

We found that scrolling around web-pages was a simple task, and double-tapping to zoom-in on certain areas worked well, as did pinch to zoom. This didn't cause any negative effects on the resolution of text or images, but when video is present, any zooming can be very jerky.

Silk is flash enabled, meaning you'll have no problem using those sites still heavily reliant on Adobe's gaming and video platform, despite Adobe's vow to kill Flash on mobile devices. As they tend to, Flash banners do not always render in the correct place.

However how much you enjoy enjoy Silk will greatly depend on how you cope with the 7-inch screen as opposed to 8.9, 9.7 and 10.1 inch displays offered by rivals.

If you're using in portrait mode you'll not see the full width of the many pages, while landscape displays minimal information above the fold.

We had no problems with reading web articles on the 7-inch screen as text re-renders to fit your environment a la the Android browser.

The entire reason for the Kindle Fire's existence is to lock you into an Amazon-controlled ecosystem where you can equip the device with hordes of books, magazines, apps (more on that later), movies and music.

How else do you think it can afford to lose a reported £6 on every device it sells?

As we mentioned above, the user interface completely revolves around pointing you to those stores, so how does the experience play out?

When you enter each of the portals, you'll be greeted with a screen showing the content you've already placed on the device and also the files you have stored on Amazon's Cloud Player.

To access new music, for example, you'll hit the Store tab, which is easy to navigate and offers MP3 previews of every track. Once you make a purchase, you have the option of storing on your device, or keeping it on your Cloud Player. You can also upload your own tracks to your Cloud Player account.

The cloud solution is one way you can circumnavigate the paltry 8GB of storage on the device as you'll be able to access all of your music and video over Wi-Fi.

It's not much help if there's no Wi-Fi available, as this device has no 3G connectivity, but there's always the option to physically download anything you have stored to the device for long journeys. And of course it saves the battery if you're not streaming all your content.

In terms of accessing movies and TV shows, Amazon is keen for you to sign up for its Amazon Prime Instant Videos service, which is free in the US for subscribers to the Prime 2-day free delivery service which costs $79 (Kindle Fire buyers get 30 days free).

For that you'll get free and unlimited streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows, but don't expect the latest blockbusters.

The newest releases, along with the latest TV shows, are available to rent for 48 hours (twice as long as iTunes) for the same $3.99-$4.99 price. Like iTunes, those files can be temporarily downloaded to your device for offline viewing. As soon as we have more info on the UK features in this area, we'll update the review.

It's the first tablet ecosystem that can compete with iTunes on an absolute level playing field. It doesn't quite possess the same nuances, like podcasts and iTunes U, but the essential stuff is there in abundance.

The Newsstand tab is very similar to its namesake in iOS 5. It features a huge array of magazines and newspapers which Amazon was smart enough to tie in prior to the Kindle Fire's launch. There's Vanity Fair, Wired, Cosmopolitan, GQ and The Economist as well as 'papers like The New York Times. These can also be stored on the cloud, rather than on the device, saving vital space.

Magazines read well, but the fluidity and panache we experienced on the iPad isn't present here. In terms of books, well it's a Kindle Reader...

The selection of 750,000 books is second to none and the purchasing interface transfers well onto the new medium. However, the reading experience isn't as pretty as on the iBooks app for iOS, we missed the true-to-life turning of the page when flicking through the book.

Members of the Amazon Prime service now also get the opportunity to rent one book a month from the store, absolutely free. Again, that service isn't yet available for UK readers.

 

As we mentioned earlier, although Android pumps the blood around its veins, the Kindle Fire doesn't really feel like an Android device. Nowhere is this more evident than in the app store department.

The presence of Amazon's own Android appstore means there's no Google-supported Android Market on this device. What that means is a dramatic reduction in the officially available applications for an ecosystem already struggling to keep up with Apple's 140,000-strong offering of iPad optimised apps.

Amazon went out and penned deals with a host of the main players in this arena, which means Angry Birds, Words With Friends, Plants vs Zombies, Dead Space and Scrabble are all present and accounted for, while the company is continuing to offer a free Premium app every day. Once again your apps can be stored on the cloud to download as you see fit.

The gaming experience on the device is relatively pleasing. It feels like using a large phone, rather than a tablet device as the extra screen real estate on devices like the PlayStation-certified Sony S1 and iPad 2 do enhance the experience, but anyone who has played video games on an Android phone will know what to expect. The multitouch-enabled touchscreen helps in this department.

In terms of streaming media there's the all-important (and newly revamped) Netflix, Hulu+, Pandora and Rdio apps, but no Spotify as of yet.

In terms of social networking, the built in Facebook icon simply links to the mobile site and there's no sign of an official Twitter client. There are third-party alternatives like Seismic, FriendCaster and Uber Social, though.

While the Amazon Appstore is well-stocked and will offer enough to get by on, no Google support means no official YouTube app, no Google+, no Maps, no Gmail, no Earth, no Voice (there's no microphone), no Translate and no Navigation (there's no GPS anyway).

These are top shelf apps that bolster the Android platform and Amazon has alienated them. Without them the device feels a little bare. You feel it really needs a YouTube app at bare minimum.

There is a way to circumnavigate this problem and root (or jailbreak) the device in order to load any app (or APK) you would like to, but this method is for seasoned tinkerers only and will void the warranty on your device.

The Amazon Kindle Fire is a completely new kind of tablet device, erring away from the "we can make an iPad too" attitude that has seen the tech world so-far fail to replicate Apple's success.

There were always going to be compromises, but Amazon has struck a very fine balance balance between the essential functionality and the price point. It's up to users to decide whether they are sacrifices they're willing to make. On the whole, we feel that Amazon has got it right.

We liked

The 7-inch form factor is executed far more successfully than the BlackBerry PlayBook, or indeed the earlier Galaxy Tab, as it retains the comforting feel of the much loved Kindle reader. The device feels solid, yet comfortable in the hand, sturdy but never cumbersome.

There's an awful lot about this device that spectacularly defies the bargain basement price point. The build is one of those things, while the refreshing user interface, display, touchscreen and built-in eco-system of content are better than they have any right to be at this price.

The buying experience was perfect and the ability to keep everything in the cloud does its best to negate the paltry 8GB hard-drive. We were also really impressed with the first iteration of the Silk browser, which is likely to get better.

We disliked

Because of the price point we were able to go a little easier on some of the Kindle Fire's limitations, of which there is a laundry list.

The decision to omit things like a front-facing camera, a microphone, 3G data connectivity, Bluetooth, GPS, the Android Market, greater internal storage (and the option of external storage) were made to keep costs to a minimum.

Regardless, these are things that we've come to expect on all mobile devices and they are invariably missed.

The software is largely great, but needs some kinks ironing, while the battery life disappointed somewhat. The lack of native Google-built apps is a problem and the privacy issues that arise with using the Silk browser is something to keep an eye on.

Verdict

The Amazon Kindle Fire represents astonishingly good value for money; perhaps the best gadget bargain of this era.

The company has unquestionably succeeded in doing what it set out to; to produce a brilliant media consumption device that doesn't break the bank. It's a solid tablet perfectly tailored to its aim of pushing you to buy digital content from Amazon.

It isn't an all-singing, all-dancing device that ticks all the boxes, neither does it attempt to be. It's is an enjoyable device to use and defies its price point in almost all areas.

However, because of the limitations we've mentioned above, this can't be considered an iPad Killer. The iPad does absolutely everything better and so it should at double the price. This, however, is an entirely different proposition to any other tablet on the market and can't be judged on the same merits.

People who want an iPad will still buy one. However, due to the sheer number of Fires that will sell, it will be the first device that can truly compete in terms of popularity and uptake.

Rather than hurting Apple, it is more likely to damage the other Android tablet-makers seeking £400 of your hard-earned for their latest offering. It was already difficult for Motorola, LG and and co to justify their prices, now it's nigh-on impossible.

They will have to cut their own prices and develop ways to combat Amazon's content-buying platform. This means more choice and better deals for everyone.

The Amazon Kindle Fire is here and the tablet landscape can never be the same again. Now all we need is for Amazon to confirm a UK launch date and price and all this excitement will finally be actionable.

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The Kindle Fire Tablet Review will give you an indepth look at the new tablet. You can now decide whether it is for you or not. So now that you have the entire Report, what are your thoughts.