I've been playing around with it all night, and I'm pretty satisfied, especially since I buy almost all of my music from amazon now. Having Netflix and the Amazon Cloud Player on here is just brilliant.
Another question. How to I get to other app stores, and how do I download those apps to the kindle?
Without rooting you can just find them on the web (that link I posted goes to a bunch of sites) and click the apk file and install them. You need to enable installation from unknown sources on the Fire to do this. It's in the Settings->More or some such.
If you want to get to the Android Market that requires rooting and some fiddling. It's not too hard, really. Just go over 2 or 3 guides before you install the market, but rooting is pretty easy. Here's a post on doing both. This page has pretty pictures on the rooting process if you want them. That site has the market install too, but they want you to buy a program to set the permission and you can do that manually.
Apparently Hitting back lots may close them, but otherwise, doesn't seem like it. Android likes to keep apps in memory it seems.
Deleting from carousel:
1. To clear apps: settings-applications-Filter by ALL APPS - App Manager-clear data.
2. Delete a video: settings-select more-applications-amazon video- clear data.
3. Clear web pages: web-menu icon- settings- Clear history
It's clunky as all hell (and has a few side effects, like no web history if you care), but that's that until they hopefully update it/a custom rom is finalized.
I'm thinking of getting either a Fire or nook tablet, but I'm not sure about the app store stuff. Are they full Android markets, or are they proprietary markets that are relatively small? I'm leaning towards the nook tablet because it's got almost double the specs for about $50 more. But if the B&N app store sucks or I'm locked into a proprietary store that will never hit proper market share to get the good stuff, then screw that. Why get a tablet like this over something stronger with an Amazon reader app?
Personally, I'd just get an eReader and forget the backlit screen and apps, but my wife almost exclusively reads magazines and newspapers.
Both the Fire and the Nook have their own proprietary markets, yeah.
The whole reason to get something like the Fire or the Nook is that they cost half as much as full-fledged tablets. If you go to buy an Android tablet with the full market access and everything you're looking at $400 minimum. With the Fire and the Nook you still get a lot of good apps though, Netflix and whatnot.
You can also root both to get the full market on them (minus specific apps that need like a camera or whatever the device doesn't have. Some of those wont work properly, at least, of course).
The Nook Tablet has a wonky partition set up where you only have 1GB to play with, but rooting should be able to get around that.
What's a good basic eReader for someone without a wireless network and no 3G around? I read about Kindle/Nook needing activation through wireless and I take it the cheaper ad supported Kindles are totally out since they wouldn't be able to fetch ads. I like the long battery life of the Kindle/Nook and the eInk screens but worry about how they work only getting connected via usb cable to a computer.
What's a good basic eReader for someone without a wireless network and no 3G around? I read about Kindle/Nook needing activation through wireless and I take it the cheaper ad supported Kindles are totally out since they wouldn't be able to fetch ads. I like the long battery life of the Kindle/Nook and the eInk screens but worry about how they work only getting connected via usb cable to a computer.
If you order the Kindle from Amazon directly they will ship it to you already registered and you never have to connect to wifi if you don't want to, you can just buy books on your pc and transfer them over via usb. Getting the ad supported Kindle is fine, you just won't be able to update or take advantage of the ads, but that doesn't prevent you from getting the more inexpensive models.
I have no clue how B&N handles this but all the B&N stores that I know of have free wifi. I'd assume you could buy one from them and activate it in the store with their wifi?
Also, I know this is a college town but the public library, 2 grocery stores and 5 restaurants within a mile radius of my apartment all have free wifi. If you needed to activate it is there not one place around you that offers public wifi?
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I've never rooted anything, so the idea of bricking a $250 piece of electronics worries me... Has it gotten more reliable since the early days of jailbreaking iPhones?
Assuming you can read and type as instructed rooting is practically unbrickable and getting the market running isn't much harder. The actually rooting bit you just click "Root" in a program after you set it up. Getting the market going the is main problem that people have and that just seems to be from using the older/wrong version so it won't download anything, but works otherwise (not that that's too helpful). You just find the right version and that fixes that. The 2nd and more serious flaw is people not paying attention and setting permissions on folders instead of files and making the system folder or something unreadable. But then that's not too hard to fix either, you just set the permissions on the folder back to the correct ones. But knowing you did that in the first place seems to be the stumbling block.
I, of course, make no promises if your PC and device explode into shrapnel. I wouldn't mess with the fonts, keyboard or wallpaper, either (all doable, but way too many screw those up it seems). :P
Rooting is really just gaining admin rights to the device. It is dead simple and really hard to screwup. Where it gets a little hairy is when it comes to flashing ROMs.
It either doesn't seem accurate, or its not accepting initial clicks. I don't have fat fingers or anything either.
It also just crashed while I was watching... evening media. Like uh, the Daily Show? The browser went down and I had to force quit it. Then the browser wouldn't relaunch, so I turned it off. Now, the damned thing is just showing the powering off screen (with the action logo moving!). Its a bit frustrating. I'll let it die overnight, see what happens when I recharge it.
It either doesn't seem accurate, or its not accepting initial clicks. I don't have fat fingers or anything either.
Sounds similar to when I played around with my sister-in-law's Fire. Clicks didn't seem to register, or they'd register twice, or incidental swipes would bring me to a place I didn't expect to go. I heard an update is coming out to address the "responsiveness" of the touchscreen, so if you can live with it for now, I'd say wait a week or so for the patch and see if that helps out.
It either doesn't seem accurate, or its not accepting initial clicks. I don't have fat fingers or anything either.
Sounds similar to when I played around with my sister-in-law's Fire. Clicks didn't seem to register, or they'd register twice, or incidental swipes would bring me to a place I didn't expect to go. I heard an update is coming out to address the "responsiveness" of the touchscreen, so if you can live with it for now, I'd say wait a week or so for the patch and see if that helps out.
Its not that bad. I don't have that many per day and it is something that doesn't bother me anyway. Perhaps day to day use got me used to how and where to click to get things to work the first time.
The biggest culprit was book, magazine reading. I just tap to page turn on the fire now. Works fine. The magazines would sometimes change pages when zoomed in and moving to the corners of the page. Now I just keep my finger on the page when moving to a corner until I don't see the Fire not trying to page turn. Works fine.
Hell I have even become attuned with the carausel and can make it stop where I want to now with ease. My point is most of the "problems" I see most people complain about dissapear with use.
Did Amazon go and block rooting in 6.2.1? So much for their "It'll be rooted, we're just accepting that." stance if they did. When it's rooted again I'll be triple sure to block updating with that crap. May just keep wifi off period.
What, exactly, can't you do with an unrooted Fire that you can do with a rooted one? Are there any downsides to rooting?
To my knowledge rooting the Fire allows you to use the Android market as apposed to only the Amazon App store.
There was a one click root but I think the latest update disabled it and I don't believe it's been fixed yet.
Amazon usually takes a "it's going to happen" stance with rooting. I think the only roots they've actively fought against are the special offers Kindles as people are buying them and then rooting to remove the adds.
I've read (but not encountered as I'm not rooted) that rooting may stop Amazon Videos from playing. If you want certain apps that aren't on the Amazon store but you have an Android phone you can get the .apk for the app from your phone using Astro and just sideload it onto the Fire.
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Well, there are definitely more apps, I don't know about worthwhile ones necessarily. I think some people also just like the regular Android interface more than Amazon's UI.
You can once again root the Fire with the (at this time) newest update (6.2.1). This handy utility(.bat file) will do all kinds of handy things for you, including root.
To get Amazon's streaming video back you can use OTA Rootkeeper to keep root but disable it when it's not needed.
Is there a lot of stuff in the Android market that's worthwhile and not in the Amazon app store?
Well, if you don't like the Silk browser there are no alternatives in the Amazon market right now. Other than that I personally haven't come across any glaring omissions.
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If I have two separate Amazon.com accounts, is there a way to move ebook purchases from one account to the other?
I want to register my Kindle with a new account, but I don't want to lose the books from my old account in the process.
Short answer: nope. You can try and ask customer service, but I don't think they'll do it.
I THINK you should be able to register it with one account, download your books, deregister it, and then attach it to the account you want to use. I don't think the kindle erases when you deregister it, but I'm not entirely sure to be honest. I'd try it myself but ... I'd have to redownload like 100 books and put them back into collections if I were wrong.
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Silk randomly loads like, 15 old pages at a time. Its really obnoxious and I don't know what is causing it or how to stop it.
Mine was doing that, but stopped with the last update. Coincidentally right after I sent a long email about it to customer support. At its worst point I had so many tabs trying to open the browser couldn't open them all.
The steps I followed to try to fix it:
1. Settings > Applications > Browser > Clear Data (lose bookmarks, worked for about a week.)
2. Reset the whole damn thing to factory (worked for about a week)
I close all tabs and clear history and cache every time I'm done with the browser.
I haven't had this issue since the 18th of this month. I wrote an email to support on the 13th, and got an email back the next day suggesting I call them, I didn't really have the time so I put it off. I went to my MIL's on the 15th while it was acting up. I took my Fire with me, but had no internet, I just used it to watch movies I had downloaded. I came home on the 18th and it was magically working correctly. I have no clue what changed to fix it honestly, I wish I could tell you.
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Try the Dolphin mini browser. Will need to sideload it, though, as last I checked Amazon was still lagging behind in tagging it as compatible.
I'm not sure Amazon is lagging so much as they really want Silk to be the browser people use. At least that's why I'd assume there are no alternate browsers in the market at all. Sucks because Silk is buggy right now, but I'd hope Amazon is working on it.
Also, I love my Kindle Keyboard. LOVE IT. But I'm thinking about "upgrading" to a touch for 3 reasons. 1) X-ray, 2) touching a word for dictionary instead of D padding to it, 3) being able to touch footnote links in text instead of D padding to them.
So, is there anyone in here with a Kindle Touch that can tell me about X-ray? Is it great? How is the touch screen, responsive? Yes, I have a Fire but I don't read books on it, I don't like reading books on an lcd, I got the Fire for Amazon Video, web browsing, and PDF's.
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Ordered a Kindle Fire yesterday. Will be here by Wednesday. Looking forward to it!
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I'm absolutely loving my Kindle fire... but man, I feel like a chump now. I found a semi-interesting sounding Novella in the lending library that looked like it might be worth a read. So I use the lending library to get it, and finish it in about 20 minutes. Now I don't get to download a new book until Feb. 1st, even though I've "returned" the book.
Yeah, the lending library isn't so hot. Silly 1 book a month, they say it's free when it's not. I need to look into if real libraries have a 1 book a month restriction for e-books.
Yeah, the lending library isn't so hot. Silly 1 book a month, they say it's free when it's not. I need to look into if real libraries have a 1 book a month restriction for e-books.
All libraries will be different on lending policies, but I can say: probably not. For instance: my local library allows 10 digital items out at one time (completely separate from physical lending limits) which includes both e-books and audiobooks. You can choose your own lending period of 1 or 2 weeks when you check out your item. In addition, you can "return" the digital item early. On the Kindle all you have to do is go to Amazon, manage your Kindle, and use the drop down menu on the item to choose the return option. For other devices I'm not sure of the procedure, but I know it's a few more steps.
I will say, however, that even though the restriction of one book a month sucks Amazon is paying authors for every instance that their book is borrowed. It's one reason that indie/self published authors were so willing to jump right in there. Amazon puts X money aside and every borrow nets an author a portion of that X.
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I've been playing around with it all night, and I'm pretty satisfied, especially since I buy almost all of my music from amazon now. Having Netflix and the Amazon Cloud Player on here is just brilliant.
Another question. How to I get to other app stores, and how do I download those apps to the kindle?
If you want to get to the Android Market that requires rooting and some fiddling. It's not too hard, really. Just go over 2 or 3 guides before you install the market, but rooting is pretty easy. Here's a post on doing both. This page has pretty pictures on the rooting process if you want them. That site has the market install too, but they want you to buy a program to set the permission and you can do that manually.
I did buy this for a reason, but there are many days I won't be using it, and I don't want it just hanging out unprotected in the open.
Also, is there a way to close apps without force stopping them in the settings? And a way to clear the carousel?
Deleting from carousel:
1. To clear apps: settings-applications-Filter by ALL APPS - App Manager-clear data.
2. Delete a video: settings-select more-applications-amazon video- clear data.
3. Clear web pages: web-menu icon- settings- Clear history
It's clunky as all hell (and has a few side effects, like no web history if you care), but that's that until they hopefully update it/a custom rom is finalized.
Personally, I'd just get an eReader and forget the backlit screen and apps, but my wife almost exclusively reads magazines and newspapers.
The whole reason to get something like the Fire or the Nook is that they cost half as much as full-fledged tablets. If you go to buy an Android tablet with the full market access and everything you're looking at $400 minimum. With the Fire and the Nook you still get a lot of good apps though, Netflix and whatnot.
The Nook Tablet has a wonky partition set up where you only have 1GB to play with, but rooting should be able to get around that.
I think that makes rooting easier? I'm not sure on the details.
If you order the Kindle from Amazon directly they will ship it to you already registered and you never have to connect to wifi if you don't want to, you can just buy books on your pc and transfer them over via usb. Getting the ad supported Kindle is fine, you just won't be able to update or take advantage of the ads, but that doesn't prevent you from getting the more inexpensive models.
I have no clue how B&N handles this but all the B&N stores that I know of have free wifi. I'd assume you could buy one from them and activate it in the store with their wifi?
Also, I know this is a college town but the public library, 2 grocery stores and 5 restaurants within a mile radius of my apartment all have free wifi. If you needed to activate it is there not one place around you that offers public wifi?
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Thanks for the help, gents (or ladies)!
Assuming you can read and type as instructed rooting is practically unbrickable and getting the market running isn't much harder. The actually rooting bit you just click "Root" in a program after you set it up. Getting the market going the is main problem that people have and that just seems to be from using the older/wrong version so it won't download anything, but works otherwise (not that that's too helpful). You just find the right version and that fixes that. The 2nd and more serious flaw is people not paying attention and setting permissions on folders instead of files and making the system folder or something unreadable. But then that's not too hard to fix either, you just set the permissions on the folder back to the correct ones. But knowing you did that in the first place seems to be the stumbling block.
I, of course, make no promises if your PC and device explode into shrapnel. I wouldn't mess with the fonts, keyboard or wallpaper, either (all doable, but way too many screw those up it seems). :P
It also just crashed while I was watching... evening media. Like uh, the Daily Show? The browser went down and I had to force quit it. Then the browser wouldn't relaunch, so I turned it off. Now, the damned thing is just showing the powering off screen (with the action logo moving!). Its a bit frustrating. I'll let it die overnight, see what happens when I recharge it.
Sounds similar to when I played around with my sister-in-law's Fire. Clicks didn't seem to register, or they'd register twice, or incidental swipes would bring me to a place I didn't expect to go. I heard an update is coming out to address the "responsiveness" of the touchscreen, so if you can live with it for now, I'd say wait a week or so for the patch and see if that helps out.
I would probably root it (assuming that's not too difficult).
Also, assuming it is worth it: who makes a good, resilient, hard case for it?
Its not that bad. I don't have that many per day and it is something that doesn't bother me anyway. Perhaps day to day use got me used to how and where to click to get things to work the first time.
The biggest culprit was book, magazine reading. I just tap to page turn on the fire now. Works fine. The magazines would sometimes change pages when zoomed in and moving to the corners of the page. Now I just keep my finger on the page when moving to a corner until I don't see the Fire not trying to page turn. Works fine.
Hell I have even become attuned with the carausel and can make it stop where I want to now with ease. My point is most of the "problems" I see most people complain about dissapear with use.
Love my Fire.
What, exactly, can't you do with an unrooted Fire that you can do with a rooted one? Are there any downsides to rooting?
To my knowledge rooting the Fire allows you to use the Android market as apposed to only the Amazon App store.
There was a one click root but I think the latest update disabled it and I don't believe it's been fixed yet.
Amazon usually takes a "it's going to happen" stance with rooting. I think the only roots they've actively fought against are the special offers Kindles as people are buying them and then rooting to remove the adds.
I've read (but not encountered as I'm not rooted) that rooting may stop Amazon Videos from playing. If you want certain apps that aren't on the Amazon store but you have an Android phone you can get the .apk for the app from your phone using Astro and just sideload it onto the Fire.
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But to be honest there isnt anything on the Android marketplace that you just couldn't sideload anyways.
To get Amazon's streaming video back you can use OTA Rootkeeper to keep root but disable it when it's not needed.
Well, if you don't like the Silk browser there are no alternatives in the Amazon market right now. Other than that I personally haven't come across any glaring omissions.
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I want to register my Kindle with a new account, but I don't want to lose the books from my old account in the process.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Short answer: nope. You can try and ask customer service, but I don't think they'll do it.
I THINK you should be able to register it with one account, download your books, deregister it, and then attach it to the account you want to use. I don't think the kindle erases when you deregister it, but I'm not entirely sure to be honest. I'd try it myself but ... I'd have to redownload like 100 books and put them back into collections if I were wrong.
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Mine was doing that, but stopped with the last update. Coincidentally right after I sent a long email about it to customer support. At its worst point I had so many tabs trying to open the browser couldn't open them all.
The steps I followed to try to fix it:
1. Settings > Applications > Browser > Clear Data (lose bookmarks, worked for about a week.)
2. Reset the whole damn thing to factory (worked for about a week)
I close all tabs and clear history and cache every time I'm done with the browser.
I haven't had this issue since the 18th of this month. I wrote an email to support on the 13th, and got an email back the next day suggesting I call them, I didn't really have the time so I put it off. I went to my MIL's on the 15th while it was acting up. I took my Fire with me, but had no internet, I just used it to watch movies I had downloaded. I came home on the 18th and it was magically working correctly. I have no clue what changed to fix it honestly, I wish I could tell you.
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I'm not sure Amazon is lagging so much as they really want Silk to be the browser people use. At least that's why I'd assume there are no alternate browsers in the market at all. Sucks because Silk is buggy right now, but I'd hope Amazon is working on it.
Also, I love my Kindle Keyboard. LOVE IT. But I'm thinking about "upgrading" to a touch for 3 reasons. 1) X-ray, 2) touching a word for dictionary instead of D padding to it, 3) being able to touch footnote links in text instead of D padding to them.
So, is there anyone in here with a Kindle Touch that can tell me about X-ray? Is it great? How is the touch screen, responsive? Yes, I have a Fire but I don't read books on it, I don't like reading books on an lcd, I got the Fire for Amazon Video, web browsing, and PDF's.
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That kinda bites, on a few different levels.
All libraries will be different on lending policies, but I can say: probably not. For instance: my local library allows 10 digital items out at one time (completely separate from physical lending limits) which includes both e-books and audiobooks. You can choose your own lending period of 1 or 2 weeks when you check out your item. In addition, you can "return" the digital item early. On the Kindle all you have to do is go to Amazon, manage your Kindle, and use the drop down menu on the item to choose the return option. For other devices I'm not sure of the procedure, but I know it's a few more steps.
I will say, however, that even though the restriction of one book a month sucks Amazon is paying authors for every instance that their book is borrowed. It's one reason that indie/self published authors were so willing to jump right in there. Amazon puts X money aside and every borrow nets an author a portion of that X.
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