My first venture into the tablet world with Amazon’s Kindle Fire

It has been a few weeks since I wrote about anything tech related  so back to it.

For those that read some of my earlier articles, I was one of those unlucky few that hadn’t ventured out into the tablet world just yet.

Try as I might I couldn’t justify plopping down a load of cash on something that I just felt I didn’t need. Wanted, yes, but need...well...

Then I ran into the problem of trying to do tech troubleshooting via my small 4 inch smart phone screen. So my wife and I talked about it and I was given a budget on finding something a little bit more practical for when I need to do some quick research. And do it without booting up the laptop or hogging the desktop.

Enter the Kindle Fire.

At $199 it fit right into the budget I was comfortable with in terms of want & need. Plus it left some money on said budget for a case and screen protection.

Also, it was big enough to be functional but not so big that I couldn’t shove it into the pockets of my cargo pants. Portability, for me, is a big selling point.

So price and functionality are just a couple of big benefits of the Kindle Fire tablet.

A few of the other features I like about the Kindle Fire are Amazon’s Cloud Drive and it’s free app of the day.

Let me get into the cloud storage first.

With the Kindle Fire you are given 8 Gigs of storage on the device. After the Operating System and preloaded apps, you are left with approximately 6 Gigs.

That doesn’t seem like a lot considering you can expand your storage on most Android based tablets.
That is where the Amazon Cloud Drive comes in.

You are given, anybody is, 5 Gigs of space to access through either the Amazon website or directly through your Kindle Fire. For a minimal fee you can quickly add an addition 20 gigs for another $20 a year. Plus you never have to worry about losing those pesky mini-SD cards.

Then there is the free-app-of-the-day program. Every day Amazon offers an app that you would usually pay for, for free. So just check the app site every morning and download that free app and store in your Cloud Drive or directly onto your Fire.

Now this device isn’t perfect. It doesn’t come with a camera or GPS. I know those are some major selling points for consumers out there. (For me, I get that in my smart phone and just didn’t need it in my tablet.)

Another issue is the limited amount of apps available through Amazon. You, the consumer, have access to only a smidgen of the hundreds of thousand apps available on the Android market.

Though it has some limitations, the Kindle Fire has a price point you just can’t beat and it is very easy to use. For those that are looking for a tablet that doesn’t have a steep learning curve, this may be the one for you.