Is the Kindle Fire Right for You? About Amazon's New Tablet

If you want to buy books, movies, music, and games from Amazon, and use the Kindle Fire to view them (or listen to them), then the Kindle Fire might be right for you.

If you want to do everything you can do on your computer on a tablet, then the Kindle Fire might not be right for you.

Jeff Bezos, the president of Amazon, says that the Kindle Fire is meant to be used as part of a service. You can subscribe to Amazon Prime for $79 a year and get access to 10,000 popular movies and TV shows. And you can also buy, a la carte, movies, music, books, magazine subscriptions, games, applications, etc. Some of these are priced pretty cheep - for example, about $4 to rent a movie.

However, if you are dreaming of buying the Kindle Fire and using it like an Android tablet or like a laptop, you might be disappointed. The Kindle Fire runs Amazon's version of Android, but not the same version of Android available on popular tablets like the Motorola Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab. Although you can browse the web, check email, and view documents on the Kindle Fire, I would highly recommend buying a tablet or netbook instead, if these tasks are your main goal. Or, at least wait until the Kindle Fire has been available for awhile and you can read customer reviews. At this point, we don't know exactly what the limitations are of the Kindle Fire.

I am skeptical of their new Silk internet browser. They say it will work faster but I'm not sure.

The Silk browser gives an image of how the webpage looked when Amazon's web servers looked at it, but not necessarily the most current page, so you might have trouble seeing the most up-to-date information. Everything that you do on Silk goes through the Amazon web servers so they can see everywhere you go. I also suspect that you might see lots of Amazon products and ads.

Regarding the Silk browser, I am taking a "wait and see" mentality.

The Kindle Fire does not work with cell phone networks. You have to use a Wi-Fi connection to use it. A Wi-Fi connection is a wireless connection to the internet. All you need for a home Wi-Fi connection is an internet connection and a wireless router. If you have more than one computer connected to the internet, you probably have a router already, but you'll want to make sure that your router has wireless.

My Grandpa only has a dial-up connection, so I recommended that he upgrade to a broadband connection before getting the Kindle Fire. It takes a long time to download movies on a dial-up connection. Often cable and telephone companies offer low introductory rates for broadband connections, so if you have dial-up, you might be surprised to find that broadband doesn't cost a whole bunch more. However, sometimes you can't get broadband in rural areas, so this is something to consider.

You can also connect to Wi-Fi at a public location that has a Wi-Fi hot spot. Many coffee shops and airports have free wi-fi, and you can also subscribe to services that give access to Wi-Fi.

If you don't have access to Wi-Fi, then the Kindle Fire isn't right for you. If you are planning to use it mainly to read books, you might consider the Kindle Touch 3G instead which provides free access through cell phone signal.