On the Road Again!

It's 7 years since I bought this piece of crap. I used it for a year and then it was put away in a drawer  You'd expect a company with a turnover in the multi billions would have been able to find some Chinese company to make something better than the Fire. You'd also hope that by the time they got to version 7 that they would have got an operating system that worked and a browser that similarly wasn't shite. They didn't!! When I dug it out. Dusted off the er... Dust. It needed charging. Of course no battery lasts the better part of six years.... Still crap. Last day of 2025.....

So my on and off love hate relationship with the Fire 7 continues. I bought it as a Christmas present to myself to replace my ancient Kindle that had decided enough was enough and it refused to charge and when it did, it would no longer connect to the internet to download new books. Generally the Fire has been okay. But. It has a major fault that despite contacting Amazon for assistance is still happening. Not all the time, but enough to be very annoying. I can download a book from my library. I can read it. The next time I want to carry on reading it shows in the folder, but errors saying I don't have the right to read it. I have to delete and re-download. Annoying at home with WiFi but not good sitting on a train to work! The other problem is that the book simply disappears from the downloaded folder and we go through above again. Oddly, re-downloaded books 99% of the time remember where I was when last read! After three occasions this month already I am ...

Powered up this morning and it did an OS upgrade. It was unclear what all the updates were, but when I opened the music app and 💥!   It works. Superb. I have created a second login using my Prime Amazon login, my main one is much older and is used for Blogger and Kindle, so that I can shop Prime and access Prime Video. That worked immediately. So we are off and running.

With my Kindle playing up and it seemingly not going to be easily repairable I saw on Amazon's Black Friday page that they had a Fire 7 tablet 8gb for £24.95 and 16gb for only £29.95. So I bought it. Then I fixed the Kindle.  The Fire went away for a Christmas present. So here we are. The Fire 7 is expandable with a Micro SD slot. I switched the 64gb card from my Canon DSLR and formatted it. What's it like to use? It is quite heavy but strangely more comfortable in hand than the Google Nexus 7. The apps pre-loaded are all Amazon related. I bought it primarily to replace the Kindle and maybe add Amazon Music. That would give me one bit of tech to cover two uses. The Kindle bit works perfectly well.  The "Silk" browser works okay and so does the email app. But.  The music app won't sync with my account.  😈 You would think if the Kindle app works, music ought to as well. The shopping app works with the correct account and shows all my or...

Thursday .  Turn my old Kindle on to download a new couple of books and nothing happens. Check the "settings" menu and the WiFi setup has gone. What? A few attempts at getting it to restart were ineffective. Then I see on Amazon Black Friday the Fire 7 tablet for sale at £29.99.  Mmmmm?  It will do Kindle and more. It's cheap... So I bought one. Delivery Saturday as too late for next day Prime. Friday. At work. Kindle playing up with messages saying unable to open the library.  I check settings. Still no WiFi and pages 1 to 3 there. Hold power button again for 30 secs or so. Screen goes white. No change  Workmate suggests holding power for much longer. Do that. Screen goes white.  Then "Kindle" appears on screen and then a bar showing it rebooting. Fixed. So there you go. Switch it off and on again does work. https://youtu.be/nn2FB1P_Mn8 P...