Travel with your Kindle Fire

I have been playing with the Kindle Fire for a few days. There are some perks when you travel with your Kindle. One of them is that it’s Wi-Fi only device, and so it depends on where you are going. If you are traveling through Europe, there are a lot of places that you can connect your Kindle Fire to their Wi-Fi in places such as restaurants and cafes. Even 3rd World Country has free Wi-Fi, if you speak their Universal Language. Just say “Wi-Fi Password” and shrug your shoulder like you don’t know. If you have a hard time understanding the person because of their heavy English accent, just ask them to spell it out on a paper or napkin.

First though, my Impression for the Kindle Fire has the feel of Kindle Touch User Interface. It’s simple, easy to navigate and get where you want to go. Newsstand, Books, Music, Videos, Apps and Web. Those are the essentials stuff. You can also change your launcher if you are tired of Amazon default Launcher by searching for Claystone Launcher in Amazon App Store.

If you are traveling with your Kindle Fire, downloading Videos might be a little wonky, it might or might not work. You can purchase a video in Amazon Videos but you might not be able to download or stream. Amazon uses a Geo Location Tracking Network to locate where you are downloading Videos from since they have rights agreement with Video Publisher on where the videos can be downloaded from. Video Streaming are applied the same with NetFlix and Hulu Plus, both uses Geo Location Tracking.

Music can still be downloaded wherever you are, and it’s fast. I downloaded some and left it on the Cloud, and the reason why I left it on the Cloud is that in-case I lost my Kindle Fire during traveling, my music is still in the Cloud and will not be lost along with Kindle Fire. It’s a precaution over practicality.

Newsstand also works like subscribing News on the Kindle Touch or Kindle Keyboard. I love this Newsstand feature, where I wake up and would have my latest news delivered to my Kindle Fire. You can download News from the Newsstand while you are traveling, and since the file are small, it doesn’t matter if the Wi-Fi you are at is super snail slow.

Personal Documents sent to my Kindle Fire while traveling was a breeze as well. I had some PDF that needs to be sent to me and I preferred it to be available on my Kindle Fire rather than on a 3rd Party Software like Evernote, which I find Evernote to be dog slow sometime when connecting to Evernote network and does not store the file offline, more inconvenient with Evernote. With the built-in Personal Documents, which is under Docs menu, I can open my Documents when there are no Wi-Fi connection available.

My previously purchased books are available for me to Download when I’m outside the U.S. So it’s convenient to read anywhere, but of course, you need Wi-Fi connection to download your books. I recommend to download the books you want to read before traveling since some books are big in file size. But at least you know that it’s not limited to your geographic location to download your books while traveling.

Apps are the same while traveling, I can purchase and download apps without restriction, and it’s a good thing too, because I get bored sometimes and Amazon App Store for Android gives away free stuff everyday, mostly games though, not productivity, at least not yet. So every day I check back at the App Store to download the free stuff and the free stuff aren’t the lame ones where it’s only rated 3 star or less, they were actually 4 star and above apps.

Web Browsing is decent, and when I mean decent, even on slow connection, it was still tolerable to surf the internet. Silk technology supposedly allows you to browse the net faster, but that is if other users who uses Kindle Fire visit your site a few hours before, it would cache those pages for you so you can surf faster. But that only works in a non-forum sites, and depends if a blog sites constantly updates, then you won’t have the same experience of Silk browsing if the site constantly changes. More Silk information from Amazon.com site “Modern websites are complex. A typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains. This takes a regular browser hundreds of round trips, and adds seconds to page load times.

Amazon Silk is different in a radical new way. When you use Silk, without thinking about it or doing anything explicit, you’re calling on the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud (AWS). We’ve refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack to push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this “split browser” architecture.

Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content.”

Those are just my experience with Kindle Fire while Traveling. I find it enjoyable, small, pocket-able, and easy to read. I got the Marware Case, which protects the back, sides and the screen. I also got a screen protector for it as well, which is not needed since Amazon claims the screen is 20 to 30 percent more durable. “Our state-of-the art Kindle Fire display is chemically strengthened to be 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic, making it extra durable and resistant to accidental bumps and scrapes.”

Enjoy your Kindle Fire.

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