I love Sheldon the Kindle. So much.
SizeIt's almost the exact same size as the kindle keyboard. Screen has a black margin all around at one half the size of my fingertip for easy grabbing without smudging the readable area.
SensitivityTouch speed I have no complaints so far. The onscreen keyboard is pretty easy to use and the keys are not impossibly small for my fingers, and my hands are not tiny, so YMMV.
Screen orientationIt flips about as fast as you turn it.
WeightEasy to carry in one hand without effort, pretty much falling into the weight sweet spot that Kindle occupies on the higher end. The back is slightly rubbery for a pretty good grip bare, but I have to admit a naked Kindle freaks me out badly. My case doesn't arrive until tomorrow, but current estimates say this is going to be pretty much as easy as carrying my Kindle around.
SoundNot terrible, not epic. Headphones work just fine.
BrowserCurrently I'm in my home network and to clarify, this house is etherneted and wirelessed for both g and n, so given Time Warner Cable having issues, my speeds are usually decent. Speed on this browser is definitely above teh average I can get when I unplug the ethernet on my laptop and use wireless g. Load time for a previously viewed page when timed against my laptop is almost the same speed and possibly slightly faster and my laptop has good cache and a solid state drive and is
fast. Therefore, I tentatively state the silk browser is
really goddamn fast.
Home screenThe home screen is three separate sections; the top is teh search bar, below it are links to your stuff in teh following categories:
Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, Web.
All have two options at the top, Cloud and Device you can switch between. With my books, a touch downloaded them fast. Video has a link to your library at the very top left and then three sections, one for Prime movies/tv that includes--thank you God--all of Farscape for
free viewing for Prime members. My God, my life is good. Amazon Prime videos cannot be downloaded and watched offline on the Kindle fire, but given a wireless connection, its', um, actually pretty fast. I took a break just now to watch the first ten minutes of Farscape ep 1.
Next down is a carousel--it really is. It basically shows what you were jsut doing (a cute pic of teh archive appeared and of the help menu and of farscape and of all my books. The third row is alll the apps you favorited.
YoutubeHD Youtube loads...really fast. I mean, that was kind of disturbing. I couldn't access some vids including Tanglewood Tree for Fingersmith, Fascination for Billy Elliot and several X-Men vids and SGA vids since they aren't enabled for mobile, but any that were enabled loaded fast and all looked much better in HD than non-HD. I mean, seriously, beyond the obvious, the HD's were
nice.
Tested successfully with the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkHwavK_urE&list=PLA742652EAF2F3634&index=31&feature=plpp_videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch3cOa7jy-A&list=PLA742652EAF2F3634&index=63&feature=plpp_videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq06MkQjAEU&list=PLA742652EAF2F3634&index=78&feature=plpp_videoOtherI wish it had a 3G option, but 3G is fucking slow, and I use broadband at home, so not having it when I don't have access to my home network might lead to homicide when nothing will load, so. The browser is ungodly fast.
ArchiveThe screen and size are fine but a little cramped when the Fire is vertical; flip to horizontal on dashboard and it's magic. Reading fic vertical is of course fine. But if someone wants to write a skin for the Fire, pretty much everything can be solved with a quick margin and tab reduction and possibly a function to hide the dashboard or turn it into a hover menu or reduce it to less than a quarter of available space. For me, the Mobile skin wasn't quite right for the Kindle screen area, but the regular archive is perfect when I flip the screen, so I'm happy. Recent bookmark list requires no orientation adjustment, so it's basically anything with the div columns.
Most websites do slightly better in horizontal mode, but none so far are unreadable in vertical; this is like, about a thousand times better than my phone.
ProblemSo far, and I have no idea why, I cant' get the download functoin working. It downloads but does not add to library and this is annoying.
NoteTo fix name, and whoo this is embarrassing, click on Synch in settings after changing it on Amazon. That does the trick.
PleaseIf anyone figures out how to download fic to library--and if it is obvious, pretend it is not--then please to be dropping a line?
Sheldon and I are getting along fine, thank you. How is everyone else with their Fires? And more importantly,
what are their names?????ETAOkay, for those, like me, who can't figure out how to get the entire fic from AO3 to Kindle, it's kind of weird. Download the book. It is now in the Download folder.
Download ES File Manager from the appstore. It's free. When downloaded, open it. You will see a list of folders, one of which is called Download. Open it and select the book by pressing down on it. If you have only books in there in multiple, on the menu, select Select All, then Cut. Or do it one at a time, IDK.
Using the top menu fourth icon, go up a level, then click on Books. When Books is open, you will see a strip of white and a tiny knob at the bottom of your screen that is where your book(s) are that you slide up to open. Hold down on the book(s) and then choose Paste.
Your AO3 books are perfectly functional and happy in the Docs folder. I am a hundred percent sure there is a stupidly easy way to do this, but its' like, 10:47 and I just want to read some fic. Calibre will automatically download your mobi files into Kindle Books folder that will appear in Docs. Yeah, no idea what is going on.
Sheldon and I are
learning each other.
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