the tablet war is heating up

[John Crichton]

To offer a counterpoint, our wireless works just fine with the Kindle Fire. As do the other dozen wireless devices in our household.

 

[Villano]

I got the Kindle Fire on Friday and I think it's great. Granted, I don't have a Nook or iPad to compare it to, but it does what I bought it to do. I searched the internet (no problems with the wireless), watched a few video clips, and I downloaded a comic from Amazon and a free preview comic from Comixology.

Since I plan on going digital with my monthly comics, the readablity on the Kindle's small screen was one of my concerns. I had absolutely no problem with the Comixology one. I love the panel-to-panel "guided view" on the Comixology app.

I couldn't zoom in on panels on the Amazon comic. The zoom only made the page slightly larger, but I didn't have any problem reading it (to me, it was no different than reading a digest sized comic). However, I'd understand if this was an issue for other people.

The only thing I don't like about the device is the lack of buttons. You have an on/off and that's it. Everything else is on the touchscreen. I'd kill for up and down scroll buttons (when scrolling on Comixolgy, I kept accidentally clicking things). Plus, I have to keep an eyeglass cleaning cloth handy because the stupid screen ends up covered in fingerprints.

But the good outweighs the bad, so, overall, not bad for $199.

 

[Banshee16]

Flash works plenty fine on mobile. I haven't had it crash a single time in three months. Is it buttery smooth 100% of the time? No. Does it frequently crash? No[/.QUOTE]
???

You've been using the Kindle Fire for three months now? And to view Marvel Digital Unlimited comics?

Or are you making a blanket statement about how all flash sites work on all mobile devices?

I'm specifically addressing your statement that "No point in allow Flash to run on your device if it's just to crash (which, of course, is Apple's point in the first place)".

I was simply pointing out that Flash does indeed work on different types of mobile devices, without crashing (or without crashing more than any other application).

That's the extent of the point that I'm making.

Amazon's got their Silk browser, and it's proprietary to them, from what I understand. It's entirely possible that the crash you experienced was just a fluke, or possibly it's a result of changes that they've made in their own browser.

Apple doesn't have a lot of credibility with *some* of their statements....."Flash doesn't work on mobile", "only the iPhone 4S is powerful enough to have Siri" etc. etc.

This is not to say that Flash can't crash, and it *can* cause security holes in an OS and serve as a vector for attacks....my work laptop got damaged this summer via an attack through Flash. But security analysts I've read have pointed out that Flash is no more vulnerable than many other technologies used online.

That's neither here nor there, however. Hopefully my first few paragraphs clarified where my statement was coming from.

I don't know enough about the Fire to contribute anything more about it. There are none available for sale in my area, so I haven't seen one. I can only say that on devices like the Transformer, or the Playbook, it works fine...admittedly, it works WAY better on the Playbook than it does on Android.

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

I called my mother up last night to check on how her Kindle Fire is working out. It isn't. It regards her wifi as having open security, rather than WPA PSK. Thus, there is never a prompt for a password, thus she never truly has access, thus she can't touch all those cloud services that the Kindle is all about. And this is one of those issues where neither her ISP or Amazon customer service is likely to be of much help, because it's always the other guy's fault.

So far, big thumbs down on the Fire.

That's too bad. The interface certainly looks pretty online. It's *possible* that this problem has to do with how her WiFi network is set up. I'm not saying it IS...I'm just saying it possibly is. My brother found a flaw in the Android WiFi connection capability through a problem he encountered at his workplace.

He was at work with his Samsung Galaxy S II, and his network admins started experiencing problems with *a* network printer they had running on their network. They started testing, and found that it was getting booted off the network.....they did more testing, and figured out it was his phone that was doing it. They had the printer set to connect via DHCP for some reason, which is a sub-optimal setup from what I understand, and they were having their routers handout IPs in the same default range that most people have their home routers hand out. *Apparently* Android has a problem where if your device is connected to WiFi and goes into sleep mode, and then comes out of sleep mode in a new environment where there is also WiFi, it doesn't release its IP, and instead, will go out and use the same IP it had been using before.....resulting in it kicking off any devices using that same IP address, in the new environment. It's a very difficult problem to diagnose, because it's dependent upon the router in question having a maxed out number of devices connecting to it.....so if there were only 2 or 3 devices connected to that router, when device #3 got kicked off by the incoming Android device, it would simply be assigned IP#4. But if there were 200 devices connected to that router, it would be a different story.

Anyways, I'm not suggesting your mother has 200 devices running on her router....just that there are apparently some peculiarities to how Android manages connections, and certain router configurations feed those problems, whereas other configurations don't let the problems happen.

When diagnosing that problem, they found that Princeton's network team had actually isolated the problem and reported it to both Google and Apple in the spring (this happened on iOS devices as well but Apple fixed the problem a few weeks after it was found, whereas Google has not).

Banshee

 

[John Crichton]

That's too bad. The interface certainly looks pretty online. It's *possible* that this problem has to do with how her WiFi network is set up.

It's a problem with her wi-fi. Ours works fine and there would be massive reports online if there were other problems like hers.

 

[Fast Learner]

Apple doesn't have a lot of credibility with *some* of their statements....."Flash doesn't work on mobile"

Would love to see an example of Flash working on mobile back when they said that.

"only the iPhone 4S is powerful enough to have Siri" etc. etc.

Would love to see where they ever said that.

 

[Banshee16]

Would love to see an example of Flash working on mobile back when they said that.


Would love to see where they ever said that.

Here you go...

Apple: Siri Only Works On iPhone 4S, We Have No Plans To Support Older Devices | TechCrunch

And apparently French developers have shown that only a single line of code prevents Siri from running on....iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, Android phones, Windows Phone 7 phones, etc.

“One line of code” prevents Siri voice command for iPhone 4S from coming to Android | Gadget Helpline

Seems to rather contradict the statements made at the first link.

Anyways, it's severely off topic, so let's not continue this part of the discussion.

As to Flash not working on mobile.....at the time Jobs made that statement, I don't honestly know if Flash worked yet on any mobile devices.....maybe test units? But obviously he was incorrect as a whole bunch of devices came out that *did* run Flash on mobile.

Try it on a Playbook. It's seamless. I wouldn't buy a specific tablet JUST to get Flash though. It doesn't matter enough to me.

Banshee

 

[Umbran]

As to Flash not working on mobile.....at the time Jobs made that statement, I don't honestly know if Flash worked yet on any mobile devices.....maybe test units? But obviously he was incorrect as a whole bunch of devices came out that *did* run Flash on mobile.

Heck, even the Nook Tablet is supposed to support Flash at this point.

It makes me wonder how well the Nook Tablet browser would support my Marvel Comics Digital Unlimited subscription....

 

[nedjer]

The Nook is a win option for those living in the US. I don't doubt there'll be a few driver glitches initially, (Android's more Windows than Mac in that respect), but it has the grunt and SD to handle the likes of Flash better than most. I'd already have one if I lived in the US. Over here its $500 for a comparable system.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Heck, even the Nook Tablet is supposed to support Flash at this point.

It makes me wonder how well the Nook Tablet browser would support my Marvel Comics Digital Unlimited subscription....

BARNES & NOBLE | NOOK Tablet? says they have a deal for marvel trades, so I assume (dangerus I know) that it must be built with it in mind.


I am considering one, since we just bought one for my mother for christmas, but I still really want to hold out for the ipad...