Current Fun & Frustration

First, the Fun Stuff.  I enrolled in Alisa Burke's
online "Sketchbook Delight" class.


http://www.shopalisaburke.com/collections/online-classes/products/sketchbook-delight

The great thing about Alisa's classes is that once you've paid for 

the course you have unlimited access to the course materials and

 tutorials and can take as long as you want to go through them.

  

 I can take off during the holidays and then get back to the 

sketchbook when life returns to normal.  Her Vimeo technique 

videos are quite good and very helpful. 

What a fun & colorful way to keep the right side of 

my brain operating.

Now, for the Frustration!!!!!!!!!

Silly me, I bought the new Kindle Fire

even though I have a perfectly good

7" Samsung Tablet for on the go fun.

To give the Fire its due, it has a gorgeous high resolution screen as

can be seen in these photos.  But . . . 

take the Fire outside and everything disappears.  I was so used to being

able to read on the Kindle anywhere that I failed to realize that a 

screen optimized for graphics will not be the old familiar Kindle screen,

which was optimized for text.

In addition, Alisa's Vimeo tutorials freeze on the Kindle Fire.

Major bummer.  To be fair, the error message does warn that

the videos are not optimized for mobile devices.  It looks like

I'll be chained to the desktop computer for awhile longer.

Another major frustration is the Touch Screen from Hell.

It's either non-responsive to my cold blooded fingers or

it's too responsive, sending me all over a website and 

zooming in and out at will.  "Stop the screen!  I want to

get off."

More irritants: 1. Storage space.  I downloaded some music files from

Amazon's Cloud storage and quite a few of my books.  It's supposed to 

have 8GB of space but, of course, the operating system takes up

some of it.  So, now, I have a message that out of 6.54 GB available

I only have 430.13 MB left.  Huh!  What on earth is taking up all

of that space?  I'm still trying to figure this out. Plus, there's

no way that you can add any SD storage.

2. Battery Life.  You definitely have to charge it every night because

whatever is going on in its brain takes a lot of energy.

3. Wireless.  Unlike a tablet where you can pay for a data plan

to run off the cell phone system the Kindle Fire depends on

wireless.  This is fine when I'm in my house but a real pain 

when I try to connect at a wireless hot spot.  We all know how

cumbersome (getting the code from the restaurant or coffee shop)

and unreliable such hot spots can be.

All in all, I would not buy the Fire again.  While it's amazingly inexpensive

(only $200) for such a gorgeous and somewhat useful tech toy its

not as versatile as a tablet.

I've read that Amazon is taking a loss on the Fire, which isn't 

surprising given some of it's great technology.  

However, if you really want a useful on the go device I'd put 

the money spent on a Kindle Fire toward a tablet, which is

more expensive (in the $500 and up range) but also more

versatile.