All Fired Up!

I am all fired up, Kindle Fired up that is. My son bought me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I have been giddy ever since. I've had it for over a week now but I am really just beginning to see the potential in the product.

Bezos should have come out singing, "I am the God of hell fire and I bring you FIRE!"

I bought a nice leather case for it with a stylus. That comes in handy when I want to use Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile. It will take some getting used to the stylus which is not nearly as easy to use as my Wacom Tablet on the PC, but will suffice for now.

It's Kindle, so all of my Kindle books are available to me for reading at my leisurere. Though not an e-Ink screen, I can still use the Fire as a reader while on the go.

I'm not really much of a gamer, never owned a gaming device, though I have played with my son's XBox 360 and Kinect a number of times, but I seem to be loading the internal memory with  games like Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, Back Stab and Madden 12, all of which play amazingly well on the Fire and for each of which I paid 99 cents. The graphics and the response of the machine are pretty damn amazing.

Video is another treat on the Fire. From YouTube to streaming full movies and TV episodes, the Fire is a smooth experience.

A few months ago I ripped all of my CDs to my PC and then moved all of them to the Amazon Music Cloud so that I could listen to them on my phone or at work. With the Fire I have access to my entire music collection.

A few months ago I gave my laptop to my step-son who needed it for work and so I went through November's NaNoWriMo without benifit of a way to go out and socialize while writing. I wrote my first novel using Scrivener for Windows and put my Scriverner data files into my Dropbox folder which allowed me to have access to them on my PC and my phone and anywhere else I had a Dropbox folder. Well, though not natively supported on the Fire, I was able to side load Dropbox onto the Fire, so my novel is now there as well. My problem is editing the files. The Fire does not have an editor for RTF (Rich Text Format) files, which is what Scrivener uses, so though I have access to them on my Fire, I still cannot edit them. Enter Slashtop!

Slashtop is a remote access app that allows me to have access to my PC desktop on my Fire. Utilizing Slashtop I have been able to work on my novel from my Fire. Not a perfect solution, but it does work and for the time being, that is enough for me.

So let's see if I can bottom-line this. I can surf the web, play amazing games, read my books, paint and draw, watch movies and TV, listen to my music and write my novel all from a $199 tablet, all for $300 less than the cheapest iPad. Only a complete fool would waste their money on the big Apple.