I’m On Fire
Well, figuratively, anyway. This is the most posting I’ve done in months!
On another “fire” note, I picked up a Kindle Fire a few days ago (which may or may not explain why I haven’t posted for a few days). I’m not sure I’m in love with it, but I am in serious like with it. It is kind of cool to have a Kindle paired up with the internet. But there are a few things Amazon needs to fix, or at least I think there are (and really, that’s all that matters to me – my own wonderful little thoughts).
They have this “carousel” of your most recently active items. So, say for instance I was reading Sex Goddess (not that I would have such a thing, or have thought about any such book being in existence). And my mother happened to look at my Kindle. She would now see the graphic, full color, hot guy-hot gal cover. And die of embarrassment. Wait – maybe that’d be me dying of embarrassment. Either way – not good. Or maybe the last book I read I didn’t like and now I have to look at it until I do another four things, like check my Facebook, check my GoodReads, check out the local Patch articles, or something equally important.
There is a “shelf” under this carousel for your favorite apps. I’d like to be able to move those shelves up on top of the carousel, but you can’t. And it looks like the stuff moves around on the shelves instead of staying where you put them. What kind of shelves are these? ‘Cause I don’t want them in my house. Can you imagine:
“Dear, where are the glasses?”
“They should be on the first shelf.”
“The first shelf has the salad plates and the deep bowls – no glasses.”
“Damn. They must have moved themselves into the next shelf over.”
Really? Where does it work this way? Nowhere but the Kindle Fire, apparently.
They did kind of screw up on the design. They put the power button at the bottom of the device. Yes, it is a BUTTON. At the BOTTOM of the device. You know, where one’s hands may be holding it. And continually bumping into said power button. But, all is not lost. You just need to turn it around and the screen rotates and the viola! the power button is up top and out of harm’s way.
But the most annoying (non)feature is the categorization feature. Meaning, there is none. Now, in my Kindle 3G I can download a book and put it into a book collection (also known as a category – like Unread (currently 130 books), Romance (currently around 150 books read), Science Fiction and Fantasy (currently around 100 books read)…. you get the idea). But this new, fancy, current, up-to-date, awesome piece of technology – nope. No book collections. No book shelves to put different books on. Just go ahead and scroll through those 600 books – we’re sure you’re going to find what you are looking for – eventually. Once you get the search party together.
Gotta run – the search party is back to stock up on vittles and take a break from looking for my next reading adventure.