Kindle Fire vs. iPad

During Xmas, my oldest daughter, her husband and I were sitting in our living room while my wife was off doing something. When she came back into the room, she found us all peering at our iPads or iPhones. She sat down in a chair and asked:

"What am I supposed to do?"

Of course we all put down our electronic toys and went back to the old fashioned method of communication, but the fact that my wife did not have any hand held computing device did not go unnoticed.

Yesterday afternoon she found an unexpected package in our mailbox. When she opened it, she found that our oldest daughter had bought her a new Kindle Fire tablet.

Actually, that was my suggestion. Our daughter thought she should have an iPad, but I thought the Fire would be a more convenient size for her to carry with her. The Fire could fit in her handbag in a pinch; an iPad could not. I had read all the reviews and it looked like a good choice in general, so that's what she went with.

First impressions

The packaging is simple. The Kindle Fire, a power supply, and the brown card you see here. That's it.

It came partially charged (excellent idea that many others could learn from) but we were on our way out for grocery shopping, so we plugged it in and left it alone for a few hours. It was fully charged when we returned.

My wife had no difficulty turning it on and finding the built in manual. If you are considering purchasing one of these and would like to read the manual, you can find it on-line here.

I was interested to see how well she'd do without help from me. She's hardly computer illiterate; she's used computers since the early 1980's and has even used my iPad now and then. She read through the manual and felt confident that she could set this up by herself.

Wireless setup

This should have been simple, but we had an odd problem caused by our Roku box booting at the same time the new Kindle was looking to set up wireless. The Kindle Fire grabbed the address the Roku had previously had and the Roku found this confusing. The Fire worked perfectly, but the Roku had to be power cycled before it would co-exist with this new electronic family member.

Though I would expect that many people will not know their wireless password. A healthy percentage of the free computer help I do in our community involves new wireless devices and unknown passwords.

I know our wireless password, so that part was easy.

Registration

Unfortunately, she then ran into an immediate problem. The Kindle Fire wants you to register using an Amazon.com account (or create a new account if you don't have one). They also offer new Kindle owners one free month of Amazon Prime.

When shopping at Amazon, my wife has been using my account. That's easier for her as I'm already set up and she has access to my credit cards and my PayPal account.

Note on the primary rule for a long, happy marriage: She spends it, I make more. It's that simple.

I didn't want her to use my Amazon account as I might someday want my own Amazon device. There would also be no point in cluttering her Kindle bookshelf with the dozens of technical e-books I own. I therefore wanted her to create a new Amazon account.

That's easy enough: give them an email address. She typed in the address she usually uses and Amazon immediately said something to the effect of "No, that's already an Amazon account, what's the password?"

Apparently she hadn't always used my account. At least once, she had created an account using this email address. Did she know the password? Of course not.

I didn't want to get into trying to reset the password, so I suggested using her Gmail address instead. That came back with the same complaint. She tried a few of her common passwords, but no luck.

So we tried the password reset. That was extremely clumsy on the Fire, mostly due to the small keyboard. I had already shown her how to tip the tablet to Landscape view to increase the key size, but that leaves less vertical space on an already small screen and we both found it impossible to get by the Captcha challenges.

I gave up and cheated. It's easy enough for me to give her an "alias" on our company mailserver, so that's what I did. She used that to set up a new Amazon account and the Kindle Fire was happy with that.

Mail

The Kindle Fire has easy email setup for Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL (as well as simple POP and IMAP). The only problem we had was the same problem I run into everywhere: she had no idea what her password is because she lets her computer memorize it. Fortunately, I do know what it is, so that setup was very simple.

Unfortunately, using it was not. She was able to figure out where to click to reply to a message, but ran into serious confusion trying to compose that reply.

First, the keyboard is very small and not very accurate. Hitting the right hand side of a key often generates the character to the right instead of what you want. I suggested that she concentrate on hitting the left side and that did help. Tipping to Landscape mode also helps.

Obviously the iPad is far superior for accuracy and keyboard size. It also costs more than twice as much, so it should be. I think she'll get used to this with time and practice.

The Fire email app underlines the line you are typing. My wife thought it was actually underlining everything (as did I), so we spent a few minutes trying to figure out why. The underlining goes away immediately after starting a new line, duh!

Fixing mistakes is very difficult on the small screen. The app does helpfully provide a large insertion pointer at times, though we are still somewhat unclear as to what turns that on. The big problem is that the inaccuracy makes it hard to get where you want to be. My wife gave up at times and just backspaced over good text to get where she needed to make a correction.

Zoom

The issue of zooming is very confusing. She could zoom up pictures in email or the web by double tapping on them, but we couldn't find any way to increase the size of text in email or on web pages. There is a "settings" button in the web browser and Text size is one of its choices, but it didn't seem to change anything. There is no such setting in the email app.

There is an "enhanced" email that apparently offers that ability and more. For the web, apparently it depends upon the page you are looking at. Flash websites and ads seem to cause odd problems too.

The iPad is again far better. Perhaps Amazon will improve this and offer an update soon. These devices are good for older folks, but small fonts are not the right way to serve that market.

Accessories

She'll need a stylus. She stole my iPad stylus for now, but I need that myself.

She also needs a cover. Or so I think, anyway, though she insists that she does not. Her solution is to wrap it in a napkin! I told her that was silly, but she retorted that the cover would just get dirty itself, so she'll need to wrap it in a napkin anyway.

Another long marriage secret: never argue about things like that.

Out on the road

One of the reasons that I thought this would be ideal for her is that she spends a lot of time sitting around waiting for doctors and therapists. Her books will be available to her whether or not the waiting room has a Wifi connection she can use and of course if they do, she can check email and browse the web.

What I don't yet know is how easy that Wifi will be for her to set up. According to what I read on the web, she shouldn't have a problem, or at least no more problem than anyone else might have. Some places make it easy, some don't. I hope that it will automatically recognize a place it has been before as my iPad will.

Care and feeding

My wife was a caring and attentive mother to our two children, but she's quite neglectful of her electronics. I often find her poor cell phone beeping plaintively because she hasn't thought to recharge it.

I suppose I'll have to be responsible for recharging the Kindle Fire, also. The battery life should not be an issue - she typically wouldn't use it for more than a few hours at a time, so if I recharge it in the early morning when I first get up, she should never have to worry about that.

The iPad has a longer battery life, but as she won't need much, that's not an issue.

Mind set

This morning, I charged up her Kindle and then rewrapped it in the napkin and returned it to where she had left it. When my wife got up a few hours later, she picked it up and brought it to the kitchen.

I assumed that she was going to turn it on and read her email. No, she just set it down (still wrapped in the napkin) and went right to her computer.

I don't know why she brought it to the kitchen. She has no medical appointments today and I simply can't imagine why she moved it if she isn't going to use it.

Final long marriage tip: don't ask why. Ever.

I'll update this as the adventure continues.