Recently, I heard from a friend who bought a Kindle Fire a few months ago. At the time, I had asked him to remember me with some feedback about his experience with the device. And that feedback was not good at all. Aside from the fact that his device died soon after receiving it, he comments that the device “usability was stripped to almost nothing for international users, there was poor application functionality, and multiple interface glitches.” It wasn’t the first time I had heard negative feedback from a friend regarding the Kindle Fire. Another friend had much the same to say about it and more. After rooting the Kindle Fire and installing a custom OS, he remarked that the hardware was inferior and that in his opinion the Nook tablet was a far superior device. The former gentleman has set his sights on a Nexus 7 and the latter has settled in with his brand new iPad.
Before the Kindle Fire was announced, it had been labelled ‘a potential iPad killer’ in the media. As I watched the [ more ]
Remember when you would borrow a book you saw laying around in the house of your friend/aunt/cousin? Reading in those days was simply a matter of seeing something you thought you might like and borrowing or buying it where it stood.
I remember my first Stephen King buy: It. (I think I may have talked about it before). I had never heard of him before that day, and I came across his book by walking into a hotel gift store. This is what the cover looked like for me:
Scary, no? To be honest, I can’t be sure whether my dislike for clowns came before or after this particular novel, in any case, I now associate clowns with King’s very unclownlike villain in this piece.
I didn’t want this to be about the book It, but rather about how we buy or borrow books. In those days, it was all about the cover and what you could read on the back cover that drew you in. For some, it was about what you [ more ]
It seems as if Microsoft is adding some necessary heat to the tablet wars. This week, they revealed their upcoming tablet called the Microsoft Surface.
Microsoft has been particularly quiet in the eReader and tablet department. Then a few weeks ago, we heard that the PC giant was pledging some $300 million to Nook, Barnes and Noble’s e-reader business. That gave many of a e-reader geek pause because if Microsoft was investing that heavily in Nook, what does that mean for Amazon and the Kindle platform?
Apple’s iPad has dominated the tablet market since its launch in April of 2010. Barnes and Noble’s Nook color and the follow-up Nook Tablet are popular but they don’t quite meet the same market demands as the iPad. Many people I’ve spoken to agree with me that the iPad is in a class by itself. It’s not an e-reader, it’s not a computer, it’s not a gaming console, but it is a pretty good attempt at providing all the functionality of those in one compact and concise platform. It certainly [ more ]