Unboxing the Amazon Kindle Fire

Hey Dave Johnson editor of eHow Tech, and let’s look at the Kindle Fire HD. There are no shortage of tablets out there today, there was a time a few years ago where if you wanted to carry a little tablet around to read books or play games your only choice was the ipad. Today there’s a million choices but the kindle fire HD is actually a really compelling choice. This is the seven inch model, it’s got sixteen gigabytes of memory and it costs $200 which is quite affordable, it’s a lot cheaper than an ipad. So if there is a media lover in your family, mom or dad or somebody like that, always wants to be reading books and watching you know videos and playing games and they want to be able to carry something around to do that, this is the one. So let’s open it up and see what’s inside. We are now inside and what do we got? There’s not a lot in the box. There is the kindle itself, there is a charging cable - so one end goes into the kindle the other end goes into your PC or your laptop. Quickstart guide, so we pull this out and it just gives you basic instructions for getting started. So let’s look at our kindle. Pull the plastic off, and the kindle, the seven inch model I think is a great size. I thought, you know, it’s about the size of an ipad mini and I’ve had an ipad for a very long time. I thought going down to something this small would be a compromise and would be very uncomfortable, but in reality it is a really good size. There’s a power button and a volume button up on the top and a headphone jack. So I’m going to go ahead press the power button to turn it on. Okay so when it comes on you get a startup screen and you can slide across to get access to all the content that stored on your kindle. Which begs the question, what content? What kind of things do you do with a kindle? Well here is where the choice of tablet that you buy depends upon how you consume, how you purchase your content. For example, if you’re the kind of person or the person that you’re buying this for is the kind of person who lives on Amazon, they buy all their books from Amazon, they buy all their music from Amazon, and so on – then the kindle is a great choice because as soon as you configure it you enter you email and amazon password, it automatically pulls in all that stuff. Once you get up and running you can pull down from the top and there is a set of settings controlling the brightness, connecting to the WiFi. Once you’re configured, there’s a home button that gives you access to shopping, which is the Amazon store, any games you have installed, apps, books, and so on. So I can tap books, here are all of my books that I have purchased and if you’ve ever used the kindle app on say the ipad or an android device, it’s going to look very similar where you can switch between the cloud and whatever’s installed on your particular device. And there’s a favorites button here where you can put the stuff you use the most often. For instance I have email pinned, the imdb app, and facebook. And so I can very quickly get to those things with just a tap. There is a fairly large app store available through kindle and you know as I say, all the books, all the music you usually use is here. I’ve become a big fan of the kindle because I’m one of those people that really lives on Amazon. I make most of my purchases and this device just automatically knows about all the things I’ve bought through Amazon and makes them available on this device. About $200 for the seven inch kindle. It’s a really good choice for somebody like me.