*headesks*

[firebyrd]

The Kindle Fire's charging port went all loosey-goosey so it wouldn't charge. Again. The $42 I spent on the extended warranty just paid for itself, as the last time we got it replaced, it was still barely under the year provided standard by Amazon. This one did better than the old ones, as we did get a year's use out of it, but still, having the port go bad after a year is ridiculous. I should have looked at it earlier, as the kids have been complaining for a few weeks, but thankfully, I did look today, and my warranty runs out on Saturday. I had Amazon call me immediately (as a funny aside, I've always had some anxiety when calling people on the phone, but clicking a website button that tells Amazon to call me instead of vice versa eliminates it) and the guy was super nice. Understood the problem immediately, asked me if I wanted to try one more time or what (I'm not sure what the what would have been, but might as well take advantage of the replacement plan I paid for!), and got everything set up so I'll get the new one on Saturday. Apparently when they send you a new one, you get a three month warranty on the replacement even if your original warranty expires, so that's nice.

I have to wonder how much money they've lost on the Fires. The first person I talked to when I first encountered this problem insisted on running me through a bunch of worthless troubleshooting steps even though the problem was becoming pretty well known (sad, since I think the product was less than six months old at that point). The subsequent times I've called in, though (and I think this will be my fourth Kindle Fire), there's been no arguments, no attempts at troubleshooting. I tell them the charging port is loose and won't work and they send me a replacement.

My Kindle product page is getting a tad ridiculous at this point. I'm on my third Kindle e-reader (though the replacements there have been due to genuine accidents, not bad engineering), Eric's got one on my account, I've got the app registered on my iPad, and then there's the Fire. The current one is named Ginny's 3rd Kindle and I've renamed the others, so I think this next one will just get dubbed #4, but dang.

Needless to say, I do not recommend buying the Kindle Fire. Both versions of the e-readers I've had have been worth every penny (though I do miss the keyboard from my 2nd gen one) and Amazon is a paragon of customer service. But the Kindle Fire is just such garbage. I think the current try at tablets would have flopped as badly as the previous attempts if it had been the Fire leading the vanguard rather than the iPad. It sure hurts to pay as much for a tablet as you could buy a crap off-the-shelf PC or build a decent one yourself, but the quality speaks for itself. I've always hated Apple, but I'm a believer in their mobile devices now (their PCs are still ridiculously overpriced, especially now that they use the same hardware as any other PC for most of them).

Comments

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

I'm too cheap and too much of a gamer to ever want to switch, plus I enjoy the process of building my own systems when I don't encounter problems that make me want to scream. :) I do love my iPad though. It is in every single way that I would ever use it superior to the Kindle. I think it might not have as robust parental controls, but since my children are not allowed to touch it, that doesn't matter to me. I've also enjoyed my iPod. I've had several cheap mp3 players over the years and they were terrible to deal with. Perhaps a similarly priced different brand would provide similar function, but since I'd ordered my iPad, I figured I'd make the jump, and I haven't regretted it (though I hate the new iOS update from using it on my mom's iPad, so haven't made /that/ jump yet. Doesn't help that she was one of those that ended up with a brick initially from making the update.).

[warriorinside.livejournal.com]

And I don't understand why that bothers people. It's all about the right tool for the job - all the tools have their place, but if it does what you want it to do, then whyever not? Your needs dictate Windows. Mine dictate a Mac. Potato-potahto, I don't get why people get uppity about that.

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if I was into video editing, I'd definitely want a Mac, which have always been superior at the job. I'm sure some of the defensiveness is because of the attitudes people perceive the "other side" as having, but who knows how and why that started. I mean, back in the 80's, there were tons of different operating systems, but I've never heard of anyone flipping out over what people were using other than the Windows vs. Mac stuff later on (which obviously wasn't even happening then since it was mostly DOS from Microsoft and who called an Apple a Mac back then? I mean, maybe I was just oblivious since kids=oblivious, but I don't think I'm crazy here.).