The Kindle Fire: Fully Loaded If A Little Fuzzy

The Amazon Kindle Fire was released on Nov. 15, and shockedconsumers with its $199 price tag. It seems like most of the rhetoric aroundthe device has been its price, and while that certainly is a huge part of itssuccess, it also has some pretty spiffy features.

I have a Fire and I've compared it to a friend's Barnes andNoble Nook and in just about every unscientific test, the Fire came out ahead.First of all, it feels great in the hand. It's a solid device that doesn't feellike you will break it in half if it gets roughed up a bit. The sleek edgesfeel like they could be an Apple product but they won't cost you an arm and aleg like some of that company's products.

The Fire also has a great app store. The Amazon App Storehas thousands of apps with tons being added daily. The Free App of the Dayfeature is a really great benefit as well. I recently downloaded the My FirstPuzzles app after it came on the App of the Day and my little nephew has probablybeen using the device as much as I have lately. The free app offerings are agreat touch.

In addition to apps, Amazon's Prime service is great forstreaming movies, TV shows and borrowing books for free. The $79 subscriptionfee is a little steep but when you consider that there are more than 10,000movie and television titles to be screened, the price seems almostinsignificant.

The device is not without its drawbacks. There are theobvious points where it doesn't stack up to the iPad, like the lack of a cameraor microphone but the Nook also bests the Fire in a few places. In a recentstudy by DisplayMate, the Fire was found to be twice as reflective as the Nook.The white balance also leaned a little to the yellow side.

I have noticed that the Fire's display doesn't seem quite ascrisp as my friend's Nook, but as long as I am able to see the screen clearly,which I certainly can — probably better than on my laptop — I'm a happy camper.The Fire is a great device if you can get over the relatively poor display andat $199, it won't burn up your savings.

Margot is a technology writer and self-professed expert onhow to get a deal using a Dell coupon. 

Send to Your Kindle-Great Utility

Now that the holidays are behind me it is time to share some new ideas and tips and tricks. I have been doing a lot more reading on my Kindle's then ever before and when I came across the Send to Kindle Chrome Extension that would enable me to send web pages to my Kindle I was really excited to test it out. So for those of you who prefer to read web content on your Kindle this could be the perfect solution. I installed the Send to Kindle Extension to my Chrome browser which was very quick. Once installed, I set the Options in the Send to Kindle Extension to send the web page to my Kindle Keyboard. Each Kindle that you own has a unique Kindle email address that you can manage from the Amazon Kindle Web page. For example a typical Kindle email address for a device might look like johnsmith@kindle.com or johnsmith@free.kindle.com. It is important to direct the web pages correctly to Send to Kindle so that you don't get charged for electronic delivery- this is more so for those of you that have a 3G Kindle. It is important to remember that there are no associated fees for delivery of electronic documents over WiFi, however there are charges over 3G. So for those of you who have a Kindle with 3G make sure you send it to a Kindle email address with a free.kindle.com account. The last step in the process is to go to your Manage your  Kindle page on the Web and enter kindle@klip.me to give  the service permission to originate electronic documents from the web to your Kindle. Now when you are browsing the web and want to collect a number of article to read on your Kindle you simply click on the Send to Kindle Extension button in the Toolbar and the next time you are reading your Kindle and are in a WiFi area all of the articles you clipped will show up ready to read. So if you are like me and like to collect some reading material for the evening to read on your Kindle then this is the extension for you. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.