Fire Convenient, but Not Necessary to Kindle My Love of Reading

For Christmas, my wonderful husband got me a Kindle Fire, among other things. Last year (2011), he had gotten me a Kindle for my birthday, and I was enjoying it more than I thought I would. Don’t get me wrong, I still love holding an actual book in my hands, turning pages while I read, using a real bookmark to mark my spot, and closing up the book when I’ve made it to the end. I can’t do any of those things when reading on my Kindle, but I have still enjoyed the convenience the Kindle allows me.

As my kids starting getting the Kindle Fire for themselves, I was intrigued enough to want to upgrade, and thankfully my husband took care of that for me. Fortunately, Amazon doesn’t place a limit on the number of Kindles that can be registered to an account, because I currently have seven registered to my account – my original one, and then a Fire for Byron, Nic, Cody, Tiffany, Ashley, and, now, me. The great thing is that we can share books and apps.

For the most part, when it comes to apps, most of what has been applied to our account has been free apps. There is the occasional app that somebody will pay for, but even then, I don’t recall anybody paying more than $5 for an app. Often, we also choose free books. A lot of the books on our Cloud are classics, and I have chosen some free books as well. That’s not to say that on occasion one of us doesn’t buy a book just for the Kindle. The great thing about all these Kindles on one account is that whatever one person buys goes to the Cloud and is available for all of us. All we have to do is download it to our own device.

Now that I have the Kindle Fire, I’m quite happy. I’m not going to stop reading actual books that I can hold in my hands, but there are so many other things I can do with the Fire. I will use my Fire for reading books, but I also have several apps that I will enjoy. There are games, such as Scrabble, Unolingo, Tetris, Solitaire, Jewels Star, Logo Quiz, Words with Friends, Jeopardy, and The American Bible Challenge. I have apps for Pinterest, WordPress, and Facebook on there. Two other apps that I’m looking forward to using are the WWPP Calculator (Weight Watchers Points Plus) and Lose It! I’ll be revising my weight-loss goal for 2013, and I’m hoping the combination of these two apps will make achieving that goal a little easier for me.

There are many other things I could choose to do with my Kindle Fire, including adding music, videos, and pictures, but I’m not sure I will do that. I still use my iPod for listening to music. I don’t know that I want to watch videos on a 7-inch screen, and I have pictures on my iPod and my phone, so I’m just not sure if I’ll be moving pictures over to the Fire or not. There’s a tab for audiobooks, but I’ve never been fond of “listening” to a book, so I don’t see myself using that. I’m also not sure how often I’ll use the tab for the newsstand. The tab for docs may come in handy. I won’t upload a lot of documents to work with, but it will be handy for carrying around the file that has my booklist. Too often I’m in a bookstore and can’t remember if I have a certain book. Being able to access this list will make life much easier. I’m sure there will be times when I’ll have another document that it will be handy to have easy access to, and when that happens, I’ll simply move it to the Kindle. Finally, there is the web link, and I’m sure that when wi-fi is available and I don’t have the laptop handy, I will be using the web browser. I’m not sure how often that will be, but it’s nice to have it if I want it.

I’ve only had my Kindle Fire for five days, but I’m very grateful to my husband for getting it for me. I had used my old Kindle more than I thought I would in the year and a half that I’ve had it, and I imagine that I’ll use the Fire even more. A couple weeks ago, someone was talking to me and said that she had read her first actual book in over a year, and it seemed weird to her to be reading a book where she had to hold it and turn pages because over the year she had only been reading books on her Kindle. I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point. I have decided that I like the convenience of reading on the Kindle, but I still love to hold and read actual books. The great thing about this device is that it does not have to replace your books. It can complement them. As for me, I’ll use my Fire as much for the other apps as I will for reading, and I will still be reading actual books along the way.

Dustin’ Off My New Toy, uh, Phone

I finally picked out the phone I wanted, and yes, I went with a Smartphone. I really couldn’t think of a very good reason in this technologically advanced world we live in for it to be anything other than a Smartphone.

I had a friend make a recommendation, and as luck would have it, that was the phone that I had been leaning toward, so I took that as a sign and that’s what I went with. One brief evening with my new toy, uh, phone, and I think I’ve made a good choice.

I do like having a touchscreen, and I love still having my keyboard. When it comes to typing a text, I do much, much better with the keyboard. I managed to get all my contacts in my new phone, and Tiffany got all my ringtones from the old phone into the new one. My phone tells me that I’ve successfully set up my email, but I guess until I actually get or try to send an email, I’ll just have to wait and see if that’s accurate. I can also access my Facebook from the new phone, and that seems to be working properly.

There is a ton of information I can add about my contacts; I just need to figure out how much of it really needs to be there. I get a neat, little flashing red light when I get a new message. I need to go through and reset personalized ringtones for my contacts who had personalized ringtones on my old phone. They may or may not get the same one, as I likely won’t remember what they all had.

There’s also this whole app thing to figure out. I’ve heard a lot about apps, but right now, off the top of my head, I can’t really tell you any names of particular apps and have no clue what types of apps I might be interested in. I’m not even real sure how to figure it out. One thing I tell my college English classes is to go to reliable sources and find experts, so that’s what I’ll have to do to figure out this app thing. I’ll ask the experts; that would the kids at school, of course.

While we were in Sweetwater, I used Nic’s Smartphone to write and post my blog. I haven’t attempted that on mine just yet, but if I’m able to do that, I’ll be happy. There aren’t a whole lot of sites I visit on a regular basis, but my blog site is one of them. It is also nice to know that if I’m somewhere without computer Internet access, I can still get a blog posted by using my phone.

So do I have way more technology at my fingertips than I’ll ever need or use? I would say so, but I’m sure I’ll have fun trying to figure out how to use it.