I need to know which one to ask for for Christmas. What are the pros and cons of each?
(What I really want is an Ipad, but that’s over-budget for now.)
If you’re mostly going to use it for reading, the basic Kindle (not the Fire) is a good value. It’s very lightweight, and you can read it outdoors. I have a Fire but I do all my reading on the basic Kindle, because the Fire is heavy and it needs frequent recharging. I can read for weeks on the Kindle without recharging.
After playing with the Fire (videos and games) when I first got it, now all I use it for is a quick Google search when I’m too lazy to go to the PC.
I loves me some Fire.
We started off with basic Kindles. When the Fire came out, we upgraded and never looked back. The only thing I can’t do with my Fire is make a phone call with it.
Some cons for the nook tablet:
Charger cable tears up easily. I have gone through three in less than a year. B&N will replace it for free while your warrenty is good, but it took me five weeks to get a new one.
The charger is made different from others, so you have to get the one B&N sells, which is $16 to $30 if your warrenty is dead.
Unless you jailbreak or root the tablet you are limited to B&N approved apps only through their store. On the good side rooting it is easy and allows you to use android apps.
While the nook does have 15 gb of space, you can only use 1gb of it for non B&N music, books, movies, etc. The rest is only usable for B&N content. (Rooting takes care of this.)
Those are my main complaints with the nook, if it helps any.
So I’m getting that the best bet is non-Fire Kindle. I suppose with my iPhone, I won’t miss the lack of Internet.
Will the Kindle work with my old MacBook?
That depends: Do you just want something you can read books on, or would you like to be able to use it for other things as well?
“Work with” how? You don’t need to connect the Kindle to a computer at all, though you can (I don’t know specifically about a MacBook).
I assumed that without the internet capability of the Kindle Fire that the Kindle requires you to hook up to a computer to transfer content.
Kindle Fire for sure. It’s really cool.
Kindle. All the way.
I don’t have the fire but we have regular Kindle’s at home.
As far as I know, you can connect your Kindle to your Mac to download ebooks and transfer files from your Mac to the Kindle.
Nope. If you have a wireless connection, you can download directly to the non-Fire Kindle. Without wireless, you’d have to transfer content via USB, and that’s a PITA.
Link to all the Kindles. They all have wireless built-in.
I have the $139 one, with the keyboard. The $69 one doesn’t have a keyboard. The keyboard is handy for searching the Kindle store – that’s all I use it for.
Without going into the technical issues, I will note that Amazon is better at giving me good recommendations. Yeah, sometimes Amazon gives me really, really screwy recs, but for the most part, I’ve been pleased, and I’ve found interesting new writers, artists, and items in the recs. B&N is not nearly as helpful.
My personal take on the Kindle - I’ve never used a Nook:
I picked up the Kindle Fire with the leather cover last year and I love it. It’s about the size of a paperback height and width wise, but only about an inch thick (with the cover). At first it felt heavy, but it didn’t take long to get used to the weight, and now it feels normal. It’s solidly built, rugged and with the case, reasonably tough. It has a touch screen, qwerty touch pad, and pinch enlarge/shrink.
Pros:
The front carousel is ok, showing all the items you had open recently. The menu along the top seperates your videos, books, apps, documents into seperate catagories. Touching the top or bottom edge brings up the options and the operating system (?) seems to mimic the android in a lot of ways.
I read every night in bed before I fall asleep, it sits nicely on my chest and easy to hold with a finger and thumb, using the thumb to touch the edge to turn the page. Touch the top right corner, a bookmark appears, tap the off button and roll over to sleep. When I pick it up again it opens up to the page I bookmarked.
With the WiFi, it’s handy to lookup netflix movies real quick if I forgot to add one, google stuff, check out the Dope :D, and shop on Amazon - all without getting out of bed at night once I’m comfortable. It has a nice qwerty touch pad with a quick rotate for horizontal or vertical use. The WiFi speed and loading times are quick.
While reading, the “touch and hold” function to look up a word is fantastic, it brings up the definition in the included Oxford dictionary, touch the bottom again and back to the book - a very nice feature.
I can read about an hour or so every night for a week before a recharge, and it’s simply plugging it in overnight on the nightstand, and good to go in the morning.
Multiple selections for text size and color, background color, and brightness. Once you adjust it to your liking, every book keeps those settings.
Finish a book, its easy to go to your wish list, one click it, and in about 15-20 seconds start reading again.
With Amazon’s Prime Membership, they offer a huge free rental library with instant delivery as well as the run of big name authors, new authors, and something I’m beginning to enjoy is finding self-published new authors, some of them are pretty good, something I couldn’t easily do in the past, and not really easy for them to do pre-digital.
Each book you buy is automatically mirrored in your cloud, so if for any reason you need to reset the Kindle or it dies, you can quickly get your library back in no time.
Cons:
I will say this though, and it is rather disappointing, but the maps or images (typically in the historical books I enjoy) cannot be enlarged while in the book function. Anything else like online or pdfs you can enlarge to get a better look at images, web pages, etc.
Also, I tried the USB to PC option a couple times, and it is a pain. Amazon needs to work on that because it doesn’t seem intuitive as to how it operates.
It is a must to keep the WiFi off when not in use as it eats up the battery pretty quick - about 3 hours or so on a full charge. I only use it to do quick searches, buy a book or read a couple articles.
The mini-usb port is at the bottom of the kindle, making it uncomfortable to charge while reading.
The speakers are ok, nothing great, but loud enough to listen to easily in a quiet room - it does however come with an earphone jack which makes up for it.
Overall I give 4.5/5, and it was definitely well worth the price ($199 at the time). Being able to hold about 6,000 books, I’ll never have to worry about buying another bookshelf again. As a ravenous reader, the Kindle was a godsend.
Turn the kindle upside down, then go into settings and lock the orientation. For reading, this enables you to have the charger in while the thing is upside down, but the reading orientation is the same for you.
This also allows me to read on my side, without the text flipping from portrait to landscape and whatnot. 
I tried that actually, but because I hold the kindle with my right hand, and the cover of the case folds back behind, I hold the case cover between two fingers with the thumb on the outside edge of the kindle to easily touch the screen edge to ‘turn’ the page. I never got used to holding it with my left hand (I’m left handed - go figure)
I hope that makes sense :dubious:
anyhoo, I’ve just gotten used to just charging it that night when the warning goes off at 15%.
So maybe it was unfair of me to mark it as a con, as it’s more of a personal quirk.
Does the Nook tablet have a micro-SD expansion slot? My plain old Nook Color does.
Also: yes, the charge cableis different. A regular micro-USB will fit the slot, but won’t charge. Well, it will, but veeeerrrrrryyyyyy slowly. So if you can leave it plugged in overnight, it will work.
Well, I got the Kindle Fire HD! Having lots of fun.
I was kind of annoyed that it didn’t come with an AC adapter. The USB cable allows me to transfer files to my MacBook, but it doesn’t charge.
I found out that I can get rid of the advertisements on the home screen by paying $15. I might do that sometime in the future.
What I’m wondering is whether I can change the default start screen. Instead of the Carousel, I’d like it to default to the list of books. Any way to do that?
Oh, and two more questions:
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Is there any way to get Kindle edition purchases on Amazon.com to go into a shopping cart instead of 1-click instant purchasing? If I’m buying multiple stuff, I like to see the entire order all together before I purchase rather than buying them one-at-a-time in a series.
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Whenever I make a Kindle edition purchase on Amazon.com, I have to make sure that I change the drop-down menu to deliver to my Kindle, because it defaults to deliver to my Iphone. Is there any way to change the default?
- Maybe put them all on a wishlist vs. purchasing, then go to the wishlist?
- I’m sure there’s a way, though I couldn’t find it just now. Maybe if you go to “manage your kindle devices” and deregister your iphone, then your actual ereader might become the default. Regardless, you should be able to go on the Kindle itself and download stuff (vs. having it pushed to the Kindle automatically).
AC adapter: That was actually something one of those comparison articles mentioned. Any cheap USB plug should work, I would think.
Thanks, Mama!
What about my question about the Carousel? Do you know anything about that?
Do you mean, purchasing a book from the computer and transferring to the Kindle via USB? Or the opposite?
Doing so with the Nook is also a bit of a pain.
I highly recommend Calibre for ebook management, though I don’t know for sure if it can handle DRMed files. I know if I import a DRMed ebook into Calibre, I can’t convert it to ePub format. It’s worth a try, anyway-Calibre is a very nice, free ebook management tool that you can use to transfer files to/from the ereader.