Random Ramblings

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).