Rec

I guess I’m a member of the tablet family.

I just got my Kindle Fire HD 8.9 and I’ve completely fallen in love with the ease of use. The minute I took it out of the box I was incredibly happy.

Then like four hours into my having it, Amazon did an update and wow, completely changed my world.

Swype.

The new keyboard allows sweeping from one letter to another to write words with your stylus. It’s so easy to do. It’s like drawing and it bypasses the need for an external keyboard at all. And with how quickly it learns your draw patterns, you could be drawing up your novel in less than five minutes.

I can already see people unable to write or type because of disability being given a voice of their own. And it’s at an amazingly affordable price.

Don’t believe me that the new sweep writing is awesome? Well, I wrote this whole thing with ColorNote Notepad and it was shockingly easy. Even more so than regular handwriting. I didn’t even have to hit the space bar–I just flowed from one word to the next and I barely had to touch the screen. So if you have a weak grip, all you have to do is just touch the screen with your stylus in a swirling pattern and you’re writing. Just make sure you catch the first and last letters and maybe a letter in the middle.

Having a tablet is great for me and my budding writing career because I don’t let myself get as distracted as I do when I use my laptop. Switching between apps means I don’t have my browser open as a window I can jump to. I have no self control and I would immediately spend
seven hours screwing around on the internet.

With my Kindle I have done an amazing amount in a short amount of time:

I have played games — I will admit that this might be a bit of a problem for me, since I’ll probably want to play all the time.Still, great fun, lots of free games if you’re cheap (like me.)

I have read books — Okay, this is where the Kindle won me over. Not only did I load my Kindle books, I also put on a bunch of downloaded books with Calibre (you might have to update your version of Calibre.) Still, I was able to download stories from Tthfanfic and AO3, then
move them to where I wanted with ES File Manager. So I now have a portable fanfic machine. Makes me so happy.

I have Tweeted — I got the Twitter app and I’ve been sending tweets and it was pretty easy, so that’s nice. I do like keeping you apprised of my still being alive.

I have watched Netflix and Hulu movies — Netflix needs to learn how to buffer, or maybe I just need to change up my settings, but Hulu was beautiful. I also checked out Viki, which worked great, I just wish DramaFever would come out with a Kindle capable app. Still, love watching what I want when I want.

I chose the Kindle Fire HD even though my brother tried to talk me out of it because I was hoping to write with it. Since I didn’t get a separate keyboard,I was starting to think I might have made a mistake because I had to tap hard to get the stylus to work. The Swype update
is a big step forward for writers using tablets. The words just seem to flow.

My big request is for the keyboard to be moved up the screen. It’s hard trying to see what I’m doing. My hand gets in the way of seeing the Amazon keyboard.

Anyways, love the Kindle Fire HD. Does what I want and didn’t cost ridiculous amounts of money.

My advice though, if you’re going to use one to write on, you can write what you want on a free notepad app, then email your writing to yourself as a backup. Then it’s simple to select and copy from your email and paste the writing into your word processing program. Backs
everything up easily and doesn’t cost anything. And yes, I am incredibly frugal, but what I really like is being able to write in bed without the heavy weight of a laptop over-heating on my legs. Very very nice.

I totally recommend the Kindle Fire HD as a winning Christmas or birthday gift. Now that I’ve got mine I have no problem with them being sold to the point of selling out of stock. Enjoy. Happy holiday shopping.