Hi Today we're going to take a look at the new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. Yes, it's a tablet. It's not their uh eBook reader like he used to with Kindle it's their first tablet they released. it's just come out and it's 1999 bucks.

The price point is absolutely amazing on this thing. Let's check it out now. even before this thing was released, there were a lot of Industry commentators out there saying that uh, and guessing that Amazon would be selling this thing at a loss, it'd be a loss leader just to sell their content. and uh, apparently people have done a an estimate of the uh, the bill of materials in this thing, the components used in there and they say it's roughly equivalent to the $199 sell price the recommended retail price for it.

So in theory, they won't be making any money out of it and they're probably even making loss. I Don't necessarily think so. I think uh, people are underestimating the buying power of Uh companies like Amazon and Apple when they are huge. You know, buying power of these companies.

they can get components cheaper than you might think they get special deals, but I don't think they're making any money on it, but probably surprised if they're actually making a loss on it anyway. Just my guess. it's a bare minimum you need for a basically a tablet in this sort of class 7in screen ,24 by 600 Uh, LCD display. It's got only got 8 G bytes of ram.

non-expandable Hate it, non- excusable. but why can't they just put a little slit in there with a Micro SD card? Give me a break, right? That's pathetic. I Know they're trying to save a couple of cents on that connector to try and get the price point down. but a hate it.

Just like the original Kindle and the uh, well, and the current uh Kindles non-expandable I Hate it Anyway, Paint in the butt. It's only got um 8 gig, uh, internal, uh, storage memory. But because Amazon have all their Cloud their cloudbased system. Woohoo! it's in the cloud, Then you know it's It's not as huge a limitation as you might think.

It's got a 1 GHz dual core processor with only 512 MB of ram. Now that's not much at all. but uh, because they've um, this silk browser used in this thing. that's what they call it Amazon's own uh browser they've rolled for this thing.

it is uh Cloud enhanc. so it doesn't need a huge amount of memory. A lot of the Uh Pro processing and a lot of the memory requirements are done. uh, rendering the pages on the Amazon servers and then it basically downloads an image to this and it's supposed to be much quicker.

Yada yada Yada is it? Well, we'll find out. And to meet the $199 price point, they've had to strip everything out of this puppy. Things you'd find, uh, standard on other tablets or expect to be standard on the higher price tablets. You don't get it on this.

There's no 3G Sim capability. Not the only way you can connect to the internet with this puppy is Wi-Fi but that's not too bad I guess for the price point, but there's no camera front or back and uh, there's no uh Bluetooth capability at all. There's no microphone. There's no GPS There's no nothing.

zip NADA but it's 199 us bucks. And as with the Amazon products, we have our certified Frustration Free packaging. Let's try it. Is it really frustration free? Let's zip it open a Beauty Look at that Taada thumb indent here.

so you just get your thumb in and lift it out like that. Tada And uh, they haven't just provided the Uh film over the top. There's actually a complete slip case this time. feels pretty darn heavy.

Wow, that's you know there's a decent amount of weight in that. and we get our uh. looks like we get our power adapter. Unfortunately, us power adapter no good here.

Uh, it's a standard micro USB uh charger and we've got the uh. the looks like the documentation is that it give me a break. That's it. That's it.

Get into know your Kindle plog it in, turn it on. Ah, and there's a power adapter 5 Vol at 1.8 amps. So it's a lot more than the 500 milliamps available from a standard uh USB uh uh Outlet So um, that is to uh, fast charge the battery. One of the first things you notice about this is the shiny screen and how mirror like it actually is I Not sure how that's going to turn up on camera there, but wow I can really it's like looking in a mirror.

really is quite remarkable. Check the hair left hand side. We' got a 3.5 mm funo Jack uh for the headphones. As you'd expect, we've got a micro uh USB connector in there.

much better than a u uh, a mini uh USB rated for much higher insertions, but that's what you've always had on the Kindles so no problems at all. and uh, the soft power switch there. and uh, nothing on the two other sides at all. And on the top here, we've got our two Uh speaker outputs there.

They are right there. but uh, apart from that, one thing you notice that's lacking of course is any form of um, uh, SD or micro SD uh card expansion. It's got this really nice sort of rubber type backing with Kindle uh recessed into there it is. It is rather nice.

It feels very high quality. Let's do the uh twist test here. I'm twisting that fairly fairly ruggedly and uh, no, it's no problems whatsoever. so the quality is certainly acceptable, especially for $199 it uh, it does feel uh like uh the other Kindles The build quality is is very good and quite exceptional for the price.

I Think let's press the button. Do we have to hold it down? or press it? Single press did. Yep, it's turned on green. it's lit up Tada Kindle Fire They've colored the fire nice bright orange faded down I Like it twidle our thumbs, we're still Kindle firing.

It's not firing too quick T There it is, we up. What do we? Hey, that's nice. Nice screen saver Monday November 21st. Let's uh, presumably that is a um swipe sort of thing.

I have no idea how to use this uh interface, but that looks like a swipey thing so let's try it while let's touch somewhere else. nothing and let's swipe that bang. That was pretty obvious. Searching for networks and we've got it.

Found my network here boond deur. that's my one. Oops and a password. I'll try that and get a straight in I I Like that.

No mess, no fuss, unable to connect. maybe I got the password wrong I don't know. We'll try again. Well I did keep trying and sure enough on the second attempt it got me in.

So I don't know. maybe marginal? uh signal. Wi-Fi Signal reception out here in the lab wouldn't be the first time. Yeah, once again, it worked on the second go.

I think I am uh getting marginal Wi-Fi Signal reception out here in the lab Anyway, it uh thought it wasn't me because I ordered this through somebody in the US It was already registered to their Amazon account but it gave me a link to come up and uh, deregister it instantly and that worked fine. There you go. It's only 404 G now. But my mind of course is in the Kindle mindset where you know the Kindle weighs like half of that and it's just.

you know, even though it's a lot less than an iPad or or a larger uh tablet, you just do feel as though it's It's pretty darn heavy cuz your mind is just in that oh, it's a Kindle and Kindles are supposed to be light, but it ain't It's 404 G. go figure. Okay, it says my Kindle is now uh, registered in my name and it's doing a software update process. and yeah, that took about 7 minutes for the uh firmware to update.

You could actually cancel that. It had a cancel button down in the bottom corner and you can update later. but nah, I don't want to do that I Want to make sure I'm using the correct firmware? Jeez, this screen. This reflective screen's really annoying.

Really starting to bug me if I switch this off and uh, there we go and I switch it on how long it looks like it does? Looks like it does boot instantly. Oh welcome Here we go. We're straight into it. Bang! We're up on the main screen and this is the main screen got they've installed the users guide there.

Beautiful! Have no problems with that at all. Wa that was far too too quick, far too quick. Kindle Fire Welcome to your new Kindle Fire and it has actually, uh, downloaded, uh, some of downloaded my content already. This is what I'm reading.

That's a bit. that's a bit weird that the Twilight of the bomb. That's what I'm currently reading at the moment. Click on the book.

There we go. It's opening the book now and uh, yes, that's uh. there. There you go.

That's the current book. I'm reading Twilight of the Bomb by Richard Rhods. Um, excellent. So my books and content are already uploaded on there and there you go.

You don't get nearly the same reflection. Of course when you got the white background where you got the black text on the white background I've turned. This is exactly the same light as before. Switch my main lights back on and to swipe through your Kindle book.

Of course you just swipe it left and right like that. No problems at all. Very intuitive. It's what you'd expect.

Now let's see if we can get up close and personal on this text here now. Uh, I can clearly see the uh, the lines on here. It's it's just not nearly as good as the Kindle display. Of course, because it it doesn't use the Eink display, it's got a more traditional um LCD display and it shows.

Having said that, the display is actually excellent I Have no problems with it uh at all and it's kind of a bit annoying actually that it highlights it as well cuz if you just want to magnify your text, then you've instantly highlight it like that. But I guess that's easy and that's an easy way to actually highlight text, but you got to hold it down and then bang. One thing that's not immediately obvious is how do you get back to the main screen? Uh well. I Originally held my finger down and found that magnifying feature, but it turns out that you can just click anywhere and bingo up.

Pops the Uh: you got your book location down here and your home button. so you just hit your home button and you're back to where you were okay. I Found a way to, uh, keep the lights on here and reduce the reflections I've got off the screen so hopefully that looks a lot better. Now let's take a look at these uh apps down here.

They've um, installed four apps. the Internet Movie Database Facebook Pulse I have no idea what that is and the Amazon store by the looks of it and you can't Um, well, it looks like our bookshelf is that big there. it's got an extra layer uh down here which we don't have. So let's go up into Apps here and have a look at what we have preloaded now.

One thing I noticed that missing from here is Twitter and I love Twitter I use Twitter all the time I Don't use Facebook as much as some other people are obsessed with it, but that's I think a big oversight. a major app missing I'm not sure if you can download it and get it. we'll have to check that later, but I'm pretty unhappy with that actually. I would have expected a Twitter client on there.

a Twitter app now. I called up the Uh Facebook app in quote marks because all it is is it looks like it just calls up calls up the mobile Vers version of Facebook in presumably the browser by the looks of it. so H not too happy with that I Expected an actual Uh custom app I guess and it has um automatically uh, put up here. It knows that this is Dave's third Kindle so it's automatically named it that.

but you can change the name of your Kindles and uh, it did have the Wi-Fi bar up here, but uh, the Wi-Fi has suddenly vanished and the battery symbol up there as you can see I haven't charged it since I got it uh, shipped and there is quite. There's probably uh, fourth, uh, fifth, uh, battery left or 3/4 at least and if you actually uh, rotate it, it's very quick to uh change to that much bigger uh keyboard. The keys are much bigger and easier to use in that landscape for Um format than they are in The Portrait format like that, but still even in the portrait format. I Find those keys are very, very usable Facebook sorry something went wrong.

Yeah, something went horribly wrong. It's called Facebook Now this is crazy I'm out in the labs still and it's now showing two bars on the Wi-Fi there. but it showed all full bars before and then it vanishes half the time. and when I go inside, it shows full bars.

It's just all over the shop at this marginal signal range it seems. I Not terribly impressed with this at all now. I Downloaded and installed the Weather Channel app. It wasn't actually pre-installed had to download it downloaded in a couple of seconds.

It was really quick and then just ran. I've added it to my my favorite screen and I uh localized it with bam Hills it's popped up with this bloody ad here. it's ad supported now. I'm actually outside here at uh dusk.

It's Qu 7 at night here in Sydney I'm just uh comparing this with the new, uh, fourth generation. uh Kindle here and uh I you know it's it's much brighter of course cuz it's backlight and back lit. uh sorry. and it's um, but look at the reflection on the screen trying to read it is see the camera in there.

It's just it's hopeless just trying to read it outside like this. You got to get it on the right angle. Otherwise got some really annoying Shadows The Kindle Nothing like that. The E in display is far superior.

Not that I'm surprised. So if I want to read a book, I'm going to pick up the Kindle uh the uh the eink display Kindle every time. Now the operating system and interface they got is actually based on uh Android. So it's based on a mobile phone operating system system, but uh uh I Don't believe it can actually run uh standard Android apps.

They have to be actually um, you know, actually approved and modified I guess uh for the Um for the Kindle Fire Now it comes with a bunch of uh standard apps as we've uh, seen now I don't really like this I mean this scroll interface isn't bad, but it's very touchy. Okay, it's finally up here. Can we actually pinch in? We can't. uh, expand that view there by pinching or doing any of that, we can just, uh, scroll through it.

Now these are the latest releases. Star Wars Let's check that one out, shall we? And there you go. That's enough of Uh Star Wars and it's I it. It's not bad at all.

The cap bill is quite good, but the I found that the Uh graphics on some of these Internet Movie Database ones fairly heavily compressed in a lot of fast Mve and action action. I see a lot of pixelization and uh, compression artifacts I'm not sure if that's uh, just the original trailer that they've got or the or they, uh, reformat the video specifically uh for the Kindle Fire or what? I have no idea and the speakers on it aren't too bad. They're probably not as uh loud as I probably would have, uh, liked. but they're not too bad at all.

But unfortunately, you got to to do the volume. You've got to get this annoying, you know, slider bar up here. They've got no external, uh, audio, uh, slider or audio volume controls on the outside. It's crazy.

And if you take a look at the book interface here, it actually shows you that this particular book here you've only read, uh, 37% of it. and uh, if you scroll through the other books, it shows you that whether or not you've actually downloaded them so it's just finished, uh, downloading this book here and it comes up with new, it means you've downloaded it and you haven't actually read it yet and you click on it and bang. you're into the book. And if you turn it around to landscape here, it does, Uh, redo the screen and all your apps.

Uh, come down like that. But let's uh, let's try out the web browser, shall we? Okay, let's do Google.com and go and see how quickly it can load it up. Supposedly with this SM silk browser, it's supposed to be Smo No, we've lost our WiFi connection again. Getting sick of this All right? I'm sick of out in the lab with this, dodgy Wi-Fi connection I'm sitting a couple of feet away from the uh router this time and God damn it.

I'm going to get something to come up. Eev blog. Let's uh, do some searching here. dot there is no.

button and let's go bang. that comes up pretty quick. I'm pretty happy with that. and there's the Google search results for Eev blog.

and if we do the pinch thing there we go. It's uh, fairly fairly smooth and it, uh, works as you'd expect. I'm fairly happy with that. and let's go to Eev Blog.com and that's pretty pretty quick.

That's pretty good, bit slower than my uh desktop uh browser, which also is uh via the same Wi-Fi connection in exactly the same location here on the desk. and uh, that renders I can't go any smaller than that actually I can't make it uh I can I can zoom in but uh I can't I can't make that any smaller by the looks of it. So um, well as you. but it's got to fit the uh, it's a WordPress page so it's rendered across the screen like that, but it's rendering my ads.

No problems at all. It's uh, got the it's got It's rendering the YouTube um the embedded uh YouTube clips. No problems at all. So let's try and play a YouTube video and uh, see how it goes? Let's try the Uh Gan resistant Redux video and remember this is embedded an respon from the previous blog on the Gausian resistor.

uh, distribution and measurement and how you can expect what can you expect from a that works quite well. Pretty happy with that and I Just jumped through to my YouTube channel here and yes, it has automatically detected that we're on a mobile device and it went to the mobile version of my YouTube uh Channel page and then back at the main screen. Here it's actually put the uh last item that we uh played with which is the uh YouTube uh channel on the web browser. There, it's put that as the first item on the stack and I rather like that but as I said, this is really quite Dicky I Don't like this interface? Go.

It's got to be some way that you can adjust the threshold on that thing. It's that one there. It's going to the Kindle Users guide. There you go: 400 W How many pages? 451 Pages for the Kindle Fire users guide.

Is it in a 100 different languages? or is it just uh. There you go. It's nice. at least that's built in onto the front page.

All right. We plugged in the USB cable here and it says you can now transfer files from your computer to your Kindle and sure enough, there it is. It's uh, pop up and it say it's popped up as an E Drive One unfortunate thing though is you need your own uh, micro USB cable because they don't. They provide you with a fixed power adapter which is just for charging, not for file transfer.

Crazy, They probably saved 2 cents there. We might, uh, drag some stuff into there and uh, see if they instantly play. and there's some of the ebooks that I uh downloaded that I already purchased and then I preloaded onto here and it stores the Uh covers into there cuz it it it only downloads uh the content on demand when you uh access it because with only 8 gig in there and it's downloading a video file at about 2.5 mbes per second and uh, there we go. It's um, yep it's popped up with my downloaded MC front Lots Zero Day album onto here and there it is.

Bang! Not a problem at all. Let's play and as you can see the alar has come up no problems. What annoying thing I've noticed is this back button here I always tend to miss it I got it that time but you go anyway. It's popped up with the album cover up the front.

that's my latest uh media content and uh if you want to adjust the volume well I don't know your guess is as good as mine. Hello, how do I turn down the volume cuz there's no external or buttons on the thing. Had to pause the stupid thing I Still can't find the volume control Anyway, it comes up with that cloud and what's on your device so you can switch between stuff that's physically loaded into your 8 gig of memory or stuff that's on the cloud and well I don't have anything on the Amazon Cloud I've never bought any Amazon uh music. but if you did, presumably it would be there.

You can download it and you can play it Brilliant! Found it dur obvious. Top Corner up here up there Bang and volume. it's automatically there. Woo! but that's nuts.

Put it in the damn app on this taskbar, idiots. It continues to play, no problems at all, switches it off so you can't interfere with it and uh, presumably uses a fair bit p A lot less power because the screen is off and you turn it back on and locks of course and you have to unlock it but your back if you want to read books and listen to music at the same time you can. Not a problem. and if we go into the video uh tab up here it shows all the Amazon video content.

CU This is the stuff that they really want to sell you, not just books like on the Kindle they want to sell you video and TV content. So You' got this uh Prime instant thing you for Prime members only. it doesn't cost anything so if you pay a fixed monthly fee, you get that or you can buy uh rent uh, oneoff movies from from $299 I'm sure a good lot of them, uh cost a bit more than that and uh TV show shows as well from $1.99 So well let's go into movies and view all and see what we get. New new releases Editors picks: Yada yada yada I Don't know.

Let's search for an awesome movie. Shall we back two? There it goes and it pops up with contents. Context: uh sensitive based on what you've typed we want Back to the Future Let's see if we can buy that ha Two bucks 99 you bet I want to buy it? Let's go back to the future. There you go.

Five stars Of course it is 299 CR All do 24hour rental. That's all we can rent it for. but oh well. I'm going to try and purchase that rent here we go.

There was an error. Your order cannot be S if the problem persist. Yeah right. Jee please I'm trying to give you money please Amazon take my money.

What's wrong with you? Come on, it was an error. Why? Cuz I'm in Australia and I don't have access to this sort of stuff. A load of garbage Watch Trailer: Let's check it out. Amazon Instant video loading You bet I Want to buy it? Come on Amazon Let me buy it please.

Now one silly thing is it's got a back button. but it doesn't have a forward button to get back where you just were if you accidentally went back. crazy. All right, there was an error.

let's see if we can buy. Harry Potter Keep the wife happy. Anyway, here we go$: 3.99 for a 48h hour rental. Let's rent that.

No, that was an error. can't do it probably cuz I'm bloody Australian All right, let's go into the news stand, shall we? I Don't mind uh, the odd newspaper? Let's see. Uh, once again, nothing's popping up. Let's go into the store here and see what we get.

Aha featured magazines, featured newspapers. Let's see all the newspapers, shall we? Beautiful! USA Today Washington Post San Francisco Chronicle Yeah, of course us Centric Nothing for us Australians or anywhere or anyone anywhere else in the world. Internet and Technology PC Magazine 2600 Magazine. Beautiful.

It's all there Wired Magazine Oh Free Free. Let's go. Yep, you bet Let's uh I Want free get app? Yeah, let's get it. You bet you purchasing the Amazon app store is not yet available in your region.

Stick it up your ass! Australia Thank you very much. kindall why Amazon Why won't you take my money? Why isn't my money the same as everyone else's It's a magazine. People all around the world can read it. Why just limit it to the US It's nuts Now let's go into the apps uh page and let's go into the gallery up here and check it out and bang it's found.

Uh, the videos and the pictures I uploaded and it looks like some uh images from the movie there and uh oh, it's got some sort of animated thing like that let's try and hey, look at that. check that out images I Like it. not a problem at all. hey Amazon this is what Sean thinks of your stupid region system and you can zoom in on the pictures too.

No problems at all. Works quite well I like it isn't Sean cute, he's such a cutie and I just use the email app to connect to my Gmail account. Not a problem, it seems to work just fine and I just read my email and it turns out that uh, when you buy one of these, you actually get one month's free. uh Amazon Prime membership and it's really quite good being able to uh, surf this content.

popular ones recently had of editors Pig genres and kids and all sorts of stuff and they got all these categories and it really is. H Quite neat. Amazon do have a hell of a lot of content on here and if we try and play a 1280 by 720 U MPEG 4 h264 uh video that I uploaded from the PC let's give it a go here. I Just uploaded it to the video subdirectory.

You got to use the uh Gallery uh player though. but let's hello there we go. Welcome to the EOG Elect Plays it no problem at all. pretty instantly.

nice and that is a Um 16, uh, well, a 169 aspect ratio. Um, so it really, uh, plays those videos. Uh, very nicely. Full screen, nice fit.

They've got this uh uh bar down the bottom that's always there which is I guess. kind of uh, kind of annoying. Now it looks like the only options you've got here on the screen are um for when you're playing the video are the volume here and Skip back the last 10 seconds over there. That's kind of Handy You can go back a couple times.

There it is, and uh, you can scroll through the timeline, but that's about it. But it's pretty instant and uh, it seems to work well. The question: how does it handle PDFs and data sheets and things like that? Well, I uploaded them from the computer into the document subdirectory. Here they are.

It doesn't give a thumbnail or anything like that, but uh, I've loaded a couple of uh PDF data sheets on here and uh, it renders beautifully I I Like it. You can scroll around like that and uh, of course, if you want to, uh flick, let's let's turn it around in portrait format, shall we? And here's one of the things if because like this will be like an A4 format page because the aspect ratio of the Uh screen is quite elongated like that. Great for viewing videos, but uh you. There's a lot of white space at the top and bottom for the Uh documents like that.

But anyway, it uh, it does render PDF beautifully and you can just scroll in. It takes a second there to uh once you've zoomed in to actually, um, get the full resolution of that. but apart from that I Going to say that this reads PDFs very very nicely I Like it. Let's go into a service manual I've got here and man, I'm finding this screen misses quite a few of my button presses.

but anyway, here's a nice uh this is an old um scanned uh PDF uh manual but there it is. beautiful. So I'd say that's a big huge Plus for this Uh device which doesn't have many pluses on its side. Uh, let me tell you apart from the Amazon uh content.

but it does view PDS very nicely. So if you're after a sort of a a 7in format uh uh thing for for uh, storing and viewing, uh PDFs this is this uh should be on your list. although the um internal non-expandable memory could be a real pain in the ass Now because I've got free Amazon Prime content for a month. Let's see if I can stream one of these shows here.

I've gone into their uh free thing in here it is prime zero cost I'm a Prime member so I got the email that told me let's see if we can uh stream that Here it is. Watch now there it is. Unlimited streaming included with your Amazon Prime membership. Well, it damn well better better work.

It's HD so it claims it doesn't tell you what HD actually is. This video cannot be downloaded at this time. Please try again. What fail And I've done this time and time again and it doesn't let me stream anything.

It's hopeless. Why give me Prime Membership if I can't use it. It's ridiculous. Maybe it's for Yanks only I Hate this and apparently it uh, supports uh watching videos through Netflix and Hulu and I've got no idea what those services are.

They're a US based thing, but I've heard they're popular, so presumably they work. But if it's anything like this Prime instant video that doesn't seem to work at all? who knows. And as far as uh, reading books, cuz this is supposed to be a Kindle that's one of the big things. The Kindle is in my opinion, the best uh eBook reader on the market.

It's fantastic, does just what it wants, but this thing's you know it's heavy. It's too heavy, twice as almost weighs twice as much as the regular uh Kindle so it's going to be hard to hold in your hand and uh, the screen just is not as good as eink I Was reading it last night in bed. wasn't too bad. I turned the brightness uh, right down.

It was all right. But anyway, it's it's you know it's good enough. not as good as the Kindle but for a tablet, it's a pretty decent uh reading experience. Anyway, he's an excellent book.

I Highly recommend you pick it up and it uh, supports you know, the regular table of uh, contents and stuff like that and uh, and it y if we go through there, we go and it's just it's not bad at all. and I do actually like the uh flick to turn the pages as opposed to the um, uh, side by side uh buttons on the side buttons, which are the Kindle I think the uh, the flick Works uh, pretty well actually. I'm quite quite happy with it, but you can't just uh uh Zoom like that, uh, whatever pinch Zoom but that's probably a good thing. um, because if you, uh, you know, touching the screen, you can change your font size you want that locked in and it's uh, pretty much ident identical to the Kindle in terms of um in terms of uh, font size and line spacing and margin and all that sort of stuff.

So it does work quite well. and of course, it's in full color. but unfortunately, this tablet has got a lot of annoying stuff and I'll just list a few. Well, first of all, but like the Kindle, it's no surprise it's got no removable battery.

You can't replace it, so when it dies in a couple of years, you won't be able to replace it, unless you're technically uh minded and you, uh, want to crack the thing open. and when you're holding the thing in your hand like this and you're watching a video or something like that, you're actually covering uh, the bottom speaker Port here. And that's just silly. It's crazy I Don't like it at all and when you're holding it in various orientations, you can accidentally push the power button and switch the thing off.

It's just not acceptable. I Don't like it. They really need to have uh, the more traditional slide, power switch, or some other power switch mechanism like they have on the Kindle because this one's just too easy to accidentally bump. And with the Amazon Prime content on this thing, you can download HD versions of the video.

You pay a bit extra for the HD version, but why would you want to when it's got no HDMI or other video output capability at all? It's crazy. That's a serious uh issue lacking for a device that they want to sell you video content. Yeah, it's perfectly, uh, acceptable to want to hook this thing up to your TV you buy. You've rented your uh, use this as a renting platform.

You rent your video, you download it, and you want to watch it tonight. Well, you don't want to watch it on your little 7-in display. That might be fine if you're taking your plane trip or something like that and you want to watch your video just holding it. But jeez, needs a HDMI port.

Another thing is the battery life is not spectacular. It's rated to 7 or 8 hour if you turn the Wi-Fi off in continuous use or something like that. but I was using it last night to read a book and granted I had the Wi-Fi on. but I got the low battery uh, warning message last night.

only you know 3 or 4 hours after I had taken it out of the box. granted wasn't fully charged, it might have to cycle a few times, but I don't think the battery life is going to be too terrific on this thing. and I think I figured out why they don't give you a standard micro USB uh cable with a separate charger is because I tried to charge it with uh my uh little USB wall charger which is only a 1 amp uh 1 amp 1 amp output capability as opposed to 1.8 with this plug pack that is supplied with it. Um, and it it it kind of charged it.

kind of sort of did and then did all sorts of weird things. automatically switched off automatically, the uh tablet automatically switched on for some bizarre reason then it would stop charging. So presumably it needs the full 1 8 Amp uh, power adapter supplyed with it. so it and if you I checked if you hook it up to your PC it can only do data connection.

it will not charge at all and that's just crazy. If you're going to put a micro uh USB connector on this thing, make sure it's damn well capable of charging from a standard half amp USB port even at a slower charge rate. Bad design I Hate it. And the other thing you've heard me mentioned time and time again.

That's really pissed me off with this thing is its poor performance at marginal uh with marginal uh Wi-Fi reception. it's just hopeless. You've got to have really good uh, strong Wi-Fi signal to get any decent uh, performance or usability out of this thing. One other minor thing is the aspect ratio of the screen.

Great for watching videos, but not ideal for reading, uh, books or other content. It's sort of a compromise between landscape and portrait uh capability. It's just a bit too stret in this sort of uh orientation, so I don't know. Good for some things.

bad for a lot of other things though. And of course with no Bluetooth you can't connect wireless headphones and things like that. But at least it does have a standard uh 3.5 mm Pho Jack on it. One other thing it doesn't have which could be fixed with uh apps in the future, but uh, it comes shipped.

It can't do any basic things like uh, calendars and appointments and just other General stuff you'd expect a tablet computer to do and you can switch off by holding down the power button down here and actually shut the thing down completely as opposed to just uh, like a soft power off. So that's a hard power off where it would use no power at all and let's see how long it takes to boot and that took 32 seconds to boot from cold. There you go. So what do I think? Well, I was impressed by two things and pretty much two things only.

uh. one was the um integration with the Amazon content. that's great seem to be a I don't know there might be some bugs in still, but I'm sure if there are sure they'll still iron it out. but uh, it's really good if you have a lot of existing Amazon content books, audio books, videos, music stuff like that, or if you want to get that sort of content seamless.

It works great if you got a Wi-Fi connection. I Love it! The other thing I really liked it was impressed by is the price point. Who wouldn't be at 199 uh bucks for a pretty good quality uh. 7in tablet like this isn't bad value at all.

but I just get the feeling this thing was rushed to Market There's lots of little annoying things to it. lots of design aspects, things missing that they could have put in they should have put in just ah. I don't know there's too much that annoys me I Guess it's got to fit into that uh, sweet stop spot between the uh smartphone, the larger uh, you know, 4in screen uh smartphones and the bigger uh 9in full featured uh tablets and it's sort of it's it's in the right price um uh, ballpark anyway and they'll probably sell millions of them purely based on the price point. the fact that it's you know it's Amazon it can read the Kindle content and fact is, if this thing wasn't from Amazon if it was just a one hung low brand uh uh, noname uh tablet it it wouldn't sell at all.

But because it's got all that Amazon content behind there, it'll no doubt sell how. whether or not, uh, it'll be longl lastingly uh, popular. whether it'll get more apps, stuff like that, who knows, if you want one of these things, well, you're going to have to make up your own mind whether or not it's suitable for your use. But I I'm struggling to think of a reason why I would buy that? buy this after I know, um, all of its little quirks and problems and things like that.

Maybe for 199 bucks you can put up with that sort of stuff. but yeah, you got to find that little niche application that you wanted for which it's suited for and works well. Whether or not it's a maybe viewing some PDFs and some video or something like that, it plays video quite well. Um, It's okay as an ebook reader, but really, stick with your regular E in display.

Kindle If you're reading books, there's no contest whatsoever. But if you only got this, it's okay. It works. but oh jeez.

I don't know. I'm just struggling to find a reason why anyone would actually buy this. Go figure. Oh well.

maybe I'll give it to the wife and she can use it for face Facebook or something. Oh no Facebook didn't even work. That's right. maybe she can check the weather or something like that I don't know.

Anyway, not that impressed with it h it's it's definitely not getting a thumbs up. Barely even gets a thumbs sideways. it's almost edging towards it. Not a thumbs down cuz it does some things quite well.

But oh geez, I don't know. See you.