It took me a while but I’ve decided to do something I haven’t really done before: I’ve decided to forgo the “famous” author route and dive into the independent and amateurs writer pool instead.  It’s fun reading grand and well thought out stories written by professionals who’ve had a lot of life experience along with a hard earned degree in literature (or whatever it takes to publish a successful book) but I wanted to see how amateur writers fare in comparison. A good idea for a story isn’t just limited to professionals but to anyone with a creative mind and who aren’t afraid to compose a story out of it. One of my New Year’s resolution of 2012 is to not be afraid of trying new things. While I would hardly label reading short stories composed by mere individuals such as myself “daring” or “adventurous”, it is something of a new experience for me nonetheless.

Wattpad

After a quick browse in the Books section within the App store, I came across a free app called Wattpad. OK, so I admit that the app’s icon is what attracted me first but it turned out to be one heck of a decision! Wattpad is very simple in nature. It allows you to download and read stories composed and uploaded by individuals such as you and I. As you can see, it doesn’t get more amateurish than this! But that’s the beauty of this app because through my quick browsing of the books available, it feels like I’ve discovered a hidden gem. There are so many books available, it will make your head spin. Luckily, unlike iBooks, you can easily browse books by categories! Horray! Put simply, think of Wattpad as the Youtube for user-generated eBooks instead of videos.

Using Wattpad is extremely simple. Just select a book category, browse for an interesting book, download it and begin reading! You can sort the search list with a different filter such as by hotness, newness or most comments. Many stories uploaded to Wattpad by users are not very long. However, that doesn’t meant you’ll likely finish a book in one sitting. In today’s society, many services are socially connected. Wattpad is no exception. You can log-in via your Facebook or personal Wattpad account. This allows you to interact with the many different readers and authors by writing comments and whatnot. This is very important because although these books are provided to you at no charge, many of the writers and authors want your honest feedback of their book. I’m sure many of them are trying to become professional authors one day and so your feedback is most appreciated.

The books are broken up via “parts”, which you can just refer to them as chapters. Each part consists of 1-6 pages. However, don’t be deceived by that number. I’m not sure what constitutes as a full page but a page inside a eBook in Wattpad is definitely longer than a single page of a physical book. You have three ways of reading your eBook. First, you can manually scroll downwards for each “part” of the book. The scrolling continues all the way until the end of the part where it will then stop. To proceed to the next part/chapter of the book, you need to single tap the right edge of your screen. Secondly, you can choose to read your eBook via the traditional method of turning page by page. This is accomplished by single tapping the right edge of your screen to advance to the next page. To head back to the previous page, you tap the left side of the screen. The third and most fun way to read your book is to let Wattpad automatically scroll through the page for you! When you activate this feature, your screen will continuously scroll downwards. You can of course choose the scroll rate.

Luckily, there are some important configurations you can tweak to help improve your reading experience. For example, you can set the font, font size,  text color and background and most important of all, toggling between normal and night mode.

In the End…

While it’s silly to compare stories written by amateurs and unknown individuals to well established authors who make a six figure income, sometimes everyone needs a breath of fresh air. Even popular authors begin to show their decline in writing after a while. This can be especially true for those who’ve earned their first big paycheck after publishing a well received book. In fact, this can be said for many other things as well, such as sports. There’s a reason why some choose to watch college basketball and football instead of the professional leagues. Many believe the amateurs, who have a lot more to prove, will play a lot harder than those who have already made it to the big boys league.

Right now, my very first book downloaded on Wattpad is called “A Touch of Poison” and it’s turning out to be pretty good! While browsing, I’ve come across many eBooks that were very long in length (lots of chapters) while some that were much shorter. Also, please do keep in mind that because eBooks uploaded to Wattpad were created by mere mortals who didn’t have the money nor the need to send their eBook to be reviewed by an editor, don’t be shocked to find spelling and grammar errors. In their defense however, many readers commonly find these same type of errors even in well published books!

I’ll repeat myself here in that Wattpad is a serious breath of fresh air. Just like with so many other things that you can get addicted to, reading is one of them. After spending so much money on books recently, I’ve decided to slow things down a bit. While some might wonder why not just browse for public domain or free Kindle books via Amazon, which there are no shortage of, its rather fun to see how creative other people can be when no money or promotion is at stake.

How it Works

Steve Gibson talked about Sandboxie exclusively in episode 172 of the Security Now podcast which you can listen below:

A very efficient and quite brilliant way to protect yourself in these situations is to isolate your browser from your hard drive/operating system. In other words, think of putting your browser application in its own “sandbox” area. You can use the browser like how you normally could but behind the scenes, the browser is isolated to its own internal area. This area is separated from all of your other applications. When bad things tries to install themselves, while it might succeed, a simple reset of the sandbox is all that’s needed and the changes will be wiped away. Your operating system will then never be the wiser. Another way to think of this is picturing how your environment works right now. When you install an application (doesn’t matter what it is), it immediately makes changes such as updating the registry with new entries and installing the actual program codes onto your hard drive. These changes and updates are live, meaning it happens immediately. Once those changes have been applied, they are then made permanent, unless of course you uninstall them. By sandboxing an application, the applications will install and make changes as normal. However, because the “area” they get to work in is isolated from the rest of the system, those changes and updates happen only in their own sandbox area and will not affect the environment outside of it. To remove the application, simply empty out the sandbox area. From your other application and operating system’s perspective, it’s as if that application didn’t exist in the first place.

Sandboxie

If you haven’t heard about Sandboxie until now, trust me, you’ll want to take the time to learn about it. It’s a beautiful application and it can help save you from a lot of headache when used properly. By viewing the animated picture below, you can easily get an idea of how Sandboxie works:

As you can see, Sandboxie doesn’t just help protect your computer from malware being installed via the browser. You can choose to put any application in its own sandbox. However, in many cases, if the application already got installed on your computer, then putting them in a sandbox might not do you a whole lot of good unless of course, it acts as some kind of gateway between the Internet and your computer like a browser. Therefore, Sandboxie is most useful when used to test new and/or untrusted applications. By running the new application in a sandbox, you can be assured that the application won’t do you any real harm should something go bad. Don’t like the application and its behavior? Simply empty the sandbox. If you conclude the application is useful, then simply empty the sandbox and then proceed to reinstall the application without using Sandboxie.

If you think about it for a second, Sandboxie is very similar to virtualization. In a past article, I detailed why you would want to use a virtual machine to test out new software. A virtual machine is awesome because software installed within the machine was isolated from your host operating system. In a way, this is similar to how Sandboxie works. With a virtual machine you could simply revert to a previous snapshot to undo the changes. With Sandboxie, you empty the sandbox. The advantage to using Sandboxie is that a user do not need to install a full blown operating system on top of their existing one. It can get confusing and without discipline, a user will simply just forget about using the virtual machine altogether because it can be a hassle to start it up each and every time. With Sandboxie, all it takes is just a couple of clicks.

Using Sandboxie

You should have a pretty good understanding of how Sandboxie works by now. Even if you do, I would still advise you to go over the FAQ pages and topics of Sandboxie. Sandboxie installs itself like any other application. Once installed, you have a icon labeled “Sandboxed Web Browser”. If you open this app, your default web browser will launch in sandbox mode. The beauty with Sandboxie is that for the most part, it is platform independent. It doesn’t matter which default browser is set. How can you tell when an application is sandboxed? For one, the applications name in the title bar will be surrounded by the [#] symbol (also reflected within Task Manager). Second, if you try moving the application window around, you’ll see the entire window surrounded by a bright yellow border.

To open any application in a sandbox using Sandboxie, simply right-click on the application icon and choose “Run Sandboxed”. That’s all there is to it. With that being done, the application will then be running in its own sandbox and should any harm come your way via that application, simply empty the sandbox area, which I’ll talk about a little later. With a sandboxed web browser, you’re probably now wondering just how the heck is it going to work when I want to download things? By default, Sandboxie includes several locations on your hard drive that should you download things to it, it will automatically allow you to “recover” those items to your actual computer. For example, if you tried to download a picture and the default location for saved files within your browser is to the Downloads folder, then Sandboxie will prompt you if you want to recover those files (the picture) to the same location on the hard drive. If you do so, you’ll then see the downloaded picture inside the Downloads folder. If you don’t choose to recover the file, then the picture will be placed within the Sandboxed content area and you’ll have to manually recover it later on.

While using Sandboxie with a web browser or any other application, you have to keep in mind that any changes you make to the browser itself (such as installing a add-on or modifying a configuration setting) will not be reflected when you run the application in normal mode afterwards. Remember, the application is sandboxed and any changes will not be saved outside of it. The reverse is also true. For example, lets say you open Firefox in Sandboxie. You play around a bit and close it. Next you open up Firefox again but this time, you don’t run it in a sandbox. Next, you proceed to install a add-on and everything works wonderfully. You close Firefox and reopen it again in a sandbox. You then find the add-on missing from the browser. This is not a mistake and its how Sandboxie works. To use the add-on in sandboxed mode, you’ll have to first empty the sandbox area. Only then when you reopen the browser with Sandboxie will the add-on appear.

Sandboxie Control Area

Sandboxie is a freeware. However, there is a paid version that allows you to use more than one sandbox. As it is in the free version, you are allowed to only create multiple sandboxes with different configurations. However, you won’t be able to use more than one at a time so it’s pretty much pointless creating them if you’re not going for the paid route. You can open the control area by double-clicking on the Sandboxie system tray icon (looks like a yellow pizza with pepperoni). Here is where you can explore your sandbox as well as emptying it. As I’m using the free version, I’ll only have the Default Sandbox to play with it.

Here, you can see that I have Firefox in sandboxed mode. I won’t go over every single detail here but only the one’s I feel are the most important and that is exploring your content and deleting your sandbox for a fresh start. Also, I want to mention that I’ve installed a simple application called Notepad++ under a sandbox as I want to show an example of how Sandboxie works. When you take a look at my installed applications in Control Panel, you can see no such item listed for Notepad++.

First, let’s explore our sandboxed contents within our default sandbox. Head over to the Sandbox menu, highlight the default sandbox, and select the Explore Contents menu option. As soon as you do, you’ll see a message box pop up with a warning. Basically, it’s telling us that the Explorer window that is about to open showing the sandbox contents will not be protected within a sandbox. However, Sandboxie is kind enough to help us here by opening whatever file you open in a protected sandbox.

Once you OK the dialog box, an Explorer window will then appear. Here, you can freely explore the contents of your default sandbox. As you traverse the folder structure, you can tell that it looks very similar to the folder structure within your actual Windows. For example, you have the AppData folder and such. As I mentioned earlier, Sandboxie is similar to virtualization. In fact, I’m sure virtualization itself plays a big part in Sandboxie. What it does is creates a similar environment for the programs to operate in. By virtualizing these folder locations, the application will not be any wiser that it’s actually installing inside a sandbox area. Microsoft also employs virtualization techniques when it comes to the User Account Control feature within Windows. In the second picture, you can see my Firefox profile folder within the sandbox. It looks pretty the same as if I browsed for the profile on my hard drive natively. By exploring your contents this way, you can freely recover any files that you deem necessary. Remember, if a program natively tries to save a file to a pre-determined area in Sandboxie, it will instantly allow you to recover it from the popup dialog box and you won’t have to actually explore the contents as I’m doing here.

Going back to my Notepad++ example, in the first of two pictures below, I browsed to the virtualized location Sandboxie installed the application. Remember, the Notepad++ application for all intents and purposes is not actually installed onto my Windows 7 machine. That is why you didn’t see it when I went into the control panel’s Program and Features applet. In the second picture, you can see Notepad++ running in a sandbox. If Notepad++ was a malicious application (trust me, its not!), then no harm will be done on my computer because it is running in the default sandbox.

To delete the contents of a sandbox, simply head over to the Sandbox menu, highlight Default Sandbox and select the Delete Contents menu option. Once you do this, your sandbox will be emptied and you will no longer be able to recover files.

In the same menu, if you select Sandbox Settings, you’ll be able to configure the behavior of your default sandbox. There are a lot of things you can control here. For example, you can configure the default recovery folders, restrict Internet access per program and a slew of other configuration settings. For the most part, you never really have to configure anything unless you really know what you are doing or you must configure Sandboxie a certain way in order to make certain applications work under sandboxed mode.

Misc. Information

Here are some important information before concluding this article on Sandboxie:

• You must have a somewhat good understanding of how Sandboxie works. This is so that you are not lured into a false sense of security. In essence you should be aware of what Sandboxie can do to protect you along with what it cannot do.
• Sandboxie cannot rewind time even if you delete its contents! In other words, if you open up Firefox under Sandboxie and sent an email you somehow wished you hadn’t, deleting the sandbox contents will not help! This might be obvious to some but you never know. For example, I wrote this entire article in a sandboxed Firefox browser. Once I publish this article, its as good as done and there is nothing Sandboxie can do to prevent that.
• You may have a hard time getting certain applications to work correctly under Sandboxie. For example, your desktop email application is one of them. If this is the case, then my usual recommendation of searching online for an answer still applies. If your application is popular enough, there is a higher chance that someone out there also tried to get it to work under Sandboxie and came up with a solution.
• Sandboxie does not replace education. If you download a dangerous piece of malware within a sandboxed browser and actually recover it and install it without running that application in a sandbox, you’re screwed.

In the end, I find Sandboxie a highly valuable addition to any personal computer system. If you have users in your household who just can’t seem to stay safe while browsing the Internet, teaching them to use Sandboxie can be a great help. If my sister can learn how to use Sandboxie and she’s a complete computer illiterate, then I’m sure so can other people as well! I’ve also recently introduced the awesome StumbleUpon feature to many users who didn’t exactly know how to explore the vast content floating out there on the Internet. Because they will be visiting all sorts of random sites with StumbleUpon, it’s imperative they have some sort of protection besides just their regular anti-virus software. With Sandboxie, you bring the complete security package to any browser as its not platform dependent. The other big advantage is that you can only choose to use Sandboxie when you want to. Its also a great solution to test out unknown software if you’re not willing to install a full blown virtual machine or have a spare computer to play with.

Sandboxie has been around for some time already and so I’m obviously late to the party in writing about it. Hopefully you’ve learned something here and to help spread the word about it as well!

Hiren’s BootCD

Going over every single utility included within HBCD is insane and of course, I won’t be doing that here! Many of the utilities will no doubt be familiar to users who have some experience with PC troubleshooting. If some tools seem unfamiliar, I would suggest you to spend a little time researching about them so that if the time for the use of that tool arises, you’ll be prepared. Having over 100+ tools at your disposal is useless if you don’t know which one to actually use to fix the problem at hand! At the very least, familiarize yourself with one or two tools from each major troubleshooting category.

One of the cool things about using HBCD is that it doesn’t depend on the operating system currently installed on the computer. HBCD includes a neat feature called Mini Windows XP where it loads a XP-like environment completely within memory (RAM) and from there, run any of the included utilities. In the past, I’ve recommended utilities such as Puppy Linux to help you recover files from an un-bootable Windows system. However, that’s all that it was really good for unless you were well versed with using Linux itself. By using HBCD, you could do that and a whole lot more simply because of all the bundled utilities. HBCD was meant to be the Swiss-army knife of PC troubleshooting. It doesn’t matter if you are a professional computer technician or just a casual computer user. Having a copy of HBCD on hand can go a long way in helping to save the day.

Here are just some screenshots of HBCD in action:

How HBCD Can Help You

I’ve always stressed the importance for users to gain some knowledge on how computers work. Especially in this day and age where electronics rule our every day lives, gaining some insight into how they work can help in many ways. My opinion is that tablet computers is a long shot away from replacing our traditional PCs and laptops especially when it comes to doing real work. Learning how to do some basic PC troubleshooting can potentially save you a lot of money considering how much nowadays a PC technician can charge. Funny thing is they’re probably using the same tools available within HBCD to do their work! In some cases, when all else fails, a computer reformat is necessary. Do you really want to spend $200+ just to have someone help you recover data when you could use HBCD to do it for free yourself and then perform a system recovery? In all likelihood, that’s what the PC technician will do anyways so why not just perform the procedure yourself? Because HBCD includes many bundled utilities, you don’t have to go software hunting. Who knows? It could be that you actually fix the problem itself with a little tinkering around.

Right now, I’m in the process of also creating a dedicated USB thumb drive to booting HBCD. I want to be prepared for whatever situation I find myself in and there were times when a malfunctioning computer would refuse to boot from the CD/DVD drive no matter what I did. From a customer’s standpoint, a technician will seem much more professional and dedicated to their job if they come to the job site prepared. Do you really want to see the technician only then to begin downloading the utilities onto your computer when they first arrive? It’s not only a waste of time but it also gives the technician a bad reputation.

From a technician’s standpoint, a copy of HBCD should follow you wherever you go. You just never know when you’ll be stuck in a situation where it could come in handy and that’s why having a copy of HBCD on a spare thumb drive is a great idea. A 1GB USB drive could be bought for less than $10. That amount of money is nothing compared to the praise and recognition you’ll receive when you find yourself using HBCD to help your boss recover his malfunctioning computer!

Romaco Timeout

Romaco Timeout’s the name and keeping your children safe is the game. OK, that was pretty lame but you won’t be saying that of the utility once you try it out! When I first tried Romaco Timeout (RT), I remembered it being able to just specify a usage quota on a user account. With the new version, you are able to do much more such as specifying websites and programs to be blocked from access and monitoring web usage.

Installing RT is your standards ordeal. Just keep hitting Next until the program gets installed.

When you first start up RT for the first time, you will asked to create a password. This is a very important step because this password is used to unlock and control the settings of the utility. You need to create a strong password and one that your kids will not be easily able to guess. For example, please do not use your favorite food as the password because your kids will most likely already know that! RT does not have a password lockout so your kids will be able to use an infinite amount of guesses to try and crack your password!

Once the password has been created, you’ll then be greeted with RT’s main interface. It might look a little daunting at first but it’s really easy to use. Also, you can skip the features you don’t want to use. For example, you can easily just use RT to create a list of websites to block while not configuring a usage quota at all! That would be a waste of the utility but you get the point.

Daily Quota Timer

OK, so the main feature of RT is allowing you the parent, to configure a use quota timer on your kids account. For example, if you only want your kids to be able to use the computer any time of the day but restrict their total daily time usage to a maximum of 4-hours, you would set a 4 hour quota limit. If your child first uses the computer for an hour then logs off, then they would only have 3 hours left for the day. If they log back in the computer 2 hours later and uses the computer for another hour, then their limit would then be down to 2 hours. Once they reach their quota limit for the day, you can configure the computer to log off and your child will not be able to log in again (sort of, continue reading below to see what I mean) until the quota limit resets, which usually happens at midnight.

Once you have the time configured, simply head back to the General tab and make sure under ‘Enabled Modules’, the Daily Quota Timer box is check marked.

The RT icon will then be displayed in the system tray (lower left hand corner). A child can simply mouse over this icon to get a quick glance at how much time they have remaining until their quota expires for the day. The icon will also turn yellow and red in color when the progress reaches 75% and 95%, respectively. After the quota expires, the user will still be able to log in but because RT is configured by default to start automatically when a user is logged in, it immediately knows that the quota has expired and will display a window asking the user to enter in the RT master password. If after 30 seconds no password has been entered, the default Action item you specified will be invoked (log off, shutdown, hibernate, ask user, etc). Restarting or shutting down the computer has no effect on the quota. Once the child logs back in, RT will continue with the quota countdown right where it left off last time.

Session Time Limit

The Session Time Limit feature of RT allows you to configure a time limit usage per log in session. The countdown begins whenever the user logs in. Once the timer has expired, the Action you specify will be invoked. However, unlike with a quota limit, the session limit is reset whenever the user logs back in to the computer (assuming the default action was to log off) or whenever the computer is restarted. By itself, I really don’t see a point for using this feature because it’s not restrictive at all. You can simply configure the session limit for your child to be 1 hour but after that amount of time has expired, your child can simply re-login to the system and the session timer resets.

Once you have the session time limit configured, simply head back to the General tab and make sure under ‘Enabled Modules’, the Session Time Limit box is check marked.

Access Window

The Access Window feature is very similar to the built-in logon/logoff scheduler inside Windows. However, whereas using Windows you could configure a different schedule for each day of the week, RT only allows you to configure a static time window. The access window is the time period you set that allows your child to log onto the computer. For example, if you want to only allow your child access to the computer between 6PM and 10PM everyday, you could set that limit here. If your child tries to log on outside of this window, they will be denied. If this feature suits your child, I would suggest using the built-in Windows feature rather than RT because it is much more granular.

Once you have the Access Window configured, simply head back to the General tab and make sure under ‘Enabled Modules’, the Access Window box is check marked.

Site Blocker

The site blocker feature simply allows you to create a list of websites you do not want your child to visit. More specifically, you are allowed to block certain domains from being accessed. Facebook is a good example or just about any other web domain you don’t want your kid to visit.

Do NOT enter in a web path such as ‘facebook.com/user/’, or include ‘http://’. Incorrect entries can cause problems with your computer’s networking, so be careful.

As soon as you add an entry here, your anti-virus software should raise an alert. This is normal because for every entry you add here, RT will add an entry into your system’s HOST file. This HOST file is consulted whenever you visit a website to see if you have any manual entries within it and if there is one matching the domain you are visiting, it will honor the setting. Here, RT will simply add the domain you want blacklisted into the HOST file and make it so that it points to the IP address of 127.0.0.1, which is simply pointing it back to your local system. Please make an exception in your antivirus software to allow RT to do its job.

Once you have Site Blocker configured, simply head back to the General tab and make sure under ‘Enabled Modules’, the Site Blocker box is check marked.

Program Blocker

The program blocker feature allows you to select which applications you do not want your child accessing. Of course, the application you want to block would have to be already pre-installed on the computer for you to select it in RT. You also have to make sure that you select the right program executable. Therefore, always test things afterward by trying to open the application after you have configured the rule in RT. The application should actually open but after a second or two, it would automatically close itself.

Once you have Program Blocker configured, simply head back to the General tab and make sure under ‘Enabled Modules’, the Program Blocker box is check marked.

Web Usage Monitor

The web usage monitor feature is one that will be very much appreciated from parents. It allows you to set a time limit on how long your child can browse the Internet per day. It does so by tracking the time spent when a browser is opened. All major browsers are supported such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Once the time limit has been reached, you can configure RT to disable the browsers. However, I found that this does not work exactly as advertised for some of the browsers. When the web usage limit has expired and the user has more than one tab open in the browser, the browser itself will not automatically close. Instead, in most cases, it will display a dialog box asking the user if they would like to close all the tabs or just the current tab. The user can simply exit out of this dialog box and continue using the browser. However, the dialog box will reappear very shortly and the user has no choice but to keep exiting out of the box if they want to continue. While the user is still able to use the browser, they will constantly have to close the dialog box which makes browsing very inefficient. Browsers that immediately exit even with multiple tabs open will not have this issue.

Once you have Web Usage Monitor configured, simply head back to the General tab and make sure under ‘Enabled Modules’, the Web Usage Monitor box is check marked.

Options and Misc.

The Options tab allow you to configure a couple of settings relating to RT. You could change your master password, when the warning message will appear, whether RT should automatically be started whenever the user is logged on (recommended), and to changing the wallpaper background on the Pause screen. Other buttons on the bottom of the screen allows you to reset the timer and limit.

Warnings and Notices

It’s easy to rely on a peice of software to help you limit what your child can and cannot do on a computer. However, do realize that nothing is perfect and if your child or whoever it is you are using RT to place limitations upon is tech saavy enough, they might be able to bypass these restrictions. Here are some that I can think of:

- If your child’s user account is an administrator, then he/she can simply create a new Windows user account and continue to use the computer unrestricted. After they are done with it, they can easily just delete the user account and you’ll never be the wiser. Because RT is configured on a per-user basis, the new user account they create will be free from any restrictions you place upon their original user account using RT. Therefore, it is important that your child not be given administrator privileges on the computer!

- A blocked site is one of the easiet restrictions to bypass. Your child can easily just visit a web proxy website and access the restricted site that way. Because there are literally thousands of web proxies out there, it is not possible for you to block every single one of them. An alternative is to use something like OpenDNS to block websites based on categories but again, your child only has to find one proxy server and they will have free reign. Also, don’t forget that blocking websites on the computer is completely useless if your child has a smart phone that can also access the web!

- The program blocker feature can be totally useless because if the program is not already install on the computer, it cannot be blocked. Even if you’ve configured a specific program to be blocked in RT, your child can simply bypass that limitation if they are allowed to install a different version of the program onto the computer.

- As far as web usage monitoring goes, all your child needs to do is find some third-party browser that RT has no knowledge about and they will have bypassed the restrictions. Once again, don’t forget to account for your child’s smart phone if they have one!

- Last but not least, don’t forget that a child can simply bypass RT altogether by simply booting the computer from a Linux rescue disc! This allows them to use the web anyway they see fit and any timer restrictions you put in place will be rendered completely useless.

With all that being said, you still have to give credit to the developer of Romanco Timout. This is one of the only freeware I know of that allows a user/parent to put a time restriction quota on their child’s user account within Windows. For many parents, this is a much needed feature as being able to just configure a schedule of when they can and cannot log in is not enough. The other features it incorporates is an added bonus but I feel that the timeout feature is the star here, hence the name of the utility itself. However, I’ll end this article by saying that you as a parent can never substitute good parenting by simply relying on a piece of software to do the job for you. Who knows what will hapen in the future but for now, you still have to communicate openly with your child and guide them along the way.

Here is how my blog looked like when visited on my iPhone:

As you can see, the format looks a little funky with that big chunk of of empty white space. You can also see that my blog loaded in its entirety. Everything from the header image to every widget on my sidebar. As far as the content area, the good news is that a reader could have easily just double-tap that area and they would automatically zoom in, like in the second picture. Things then looked a lot more readable. However, mobilizing my site is still something I want to achieve rather than just relying on a double-tap.

In this article, there are two free services/plugins that I would like to promote. These two services offers you a free and very simple way to get your blog running mobile-friendly in just a matter of minutes.

WPtouch

I believe this is one of the more popular plugins offered for the WordPress platform for users wanting to mobilize their site. I have slight memory of trying this plugin in the past but again, I believe it didn’t work for me for whatever reason I don’t know. I’ve recently upgraded to the latest and stable version of WordPress (3.3.1) and I am also currently using the  stable WordPress Genesis theme framework by Studiopress. Therefore, I figured I would give this plugin another shot just to see if my luck has improved.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, the only thing you have to do next is customize it to your liking! Automatically, WPtouch will begin working in the background and every time a visitor lands on your website via a mobile device, WPtouch will load the mobile version. Here you can see my homepage and a blog post once WPtouch has been activated:

You’ll no doubt notice immediately that all of my sidebar widgets have disappeared. This is normal because a mobilized version of a website or blog focuses only on the main content of the site and cuts away other unnecessary distractions to save space. Removing those items also helps conserve bandwidth and helps your site to load a lot faster.

WPtouch does have some options for you to toggle around with. Mainly, you can enable thumbnail images on the the home page, chose a background theme, enable or disable zooming, uploading and choosing your own icons for each page, and even enabling Google Adsense.

If at first activating WPtouch gives you an error when you visit your blog’s home page, don’t panic. Head over to WPtouch’s Options page and under the Home Page Re-Direction drop-down menu option box, select WordPress Settings. Wait a few seconds and reload your site. Hopefully, it should work then.

What’s most helpful is that WPtouch helps explains what most of the options do. Simply click on the little red question mark next to the setting in question and a little popup box will appear explaining what that setting will do. However, many of the settings are pretty self-explanatory but if you’re still not sure at what a setting will do if enabled or disabled, simply configure it, reload your site via a mobile device and note the difference. If it’s not to your liking, then simply revert the change to its previous configuration.

Wapple

I only first heard about Wapple recently and that was only due to me searching to see if the Genesis framework I’m using includes a mobile template. Well, it doesn’t but a FAQ by Studiopress suggested using a service such as Wapple. I briefly checked it out and decided it was well worth trying. It’s free and most importantly, their official website looked very well made and enticing! I know, I know. Never judge a book by its cover but this service was suggested by Studiopress and being how they actually created a whole theme framework for WordPress used by thousands of bloggers, I’m pretty sure they know what they are talking about!

Once you’ve downloaded and activated the plugin, you’ll actually have to signup for a developer key before Wapple can begin its work. Signing up for the key is very easy and fast. You can do so from this link here. The key will be emailed to you once you’ve completed the signup and you’ll then have everything needed to begin using Wapple. Simply head over to the Basic tab and paste the key you’ve received from Wapple in youremail  into the ‘Wapple Architect Dev Key’ field. Once done so, Wapple will then truly be activated and you can then configure the other settings. Here is how my blog looks like with Wapple using the Obsidian theme:

Of course, it looks a little plain right now but I’m still deciding at the moment whether to permanently use WPtouch or Wapple. The latter definitely has a lot more options for you to play with but for users who just want something simple, you’ll most likely ignore a majority of them. But whatever the case, Wapple got my site mobilized as soon as I entered in the developer key and for that I am very grateful.

Should you Mobilize your Site?

I’ve only shown two methods here to help you mobilize your WordPress site. I’m sure there are a dozen of other ways as well but if you’re not an HTML expert, don’t even bother. The big question is whether you should create a mobile version of your site or not. In my opinion, I think you definitely should. I’m sure you are already aware of the huge demand for mobile devices. With smart phones paving the way, more people are engaging your blog or site while on the go. Many a times, people just grumble whenever a site loads the desktop version on their smart phone because now the reader has to put in some work to navigate around your site. With a mobile version up and running, the reader just has to select what he/she wants to read and that’s it. Of course, they still have to scroll vertically but at least now the page doesn’t “wiggle” from left to right when zoomed in.

Some readers are against mobilizing a site because as I mentioned earlier, a mobile version of a site strips away many of the extra elements that a reader might want to see or engage in. Whatever the case, I still feel the advantages outweighs the disadvantages. At the very least, some readers actually consider a mobile-friendly version of your site as pure politeness. You just can’t argue that navigating around a mobile-friendly site is harder than the opposite. If you don’t create one, your readers might actually think that you don’t care about them and you’ll potentially lose a subscriber.

How F.lux works is simple and yet so damn brilliant! When activated, it applies a yellow’ish/orange’ish filter over your entire monitor screen. That’s it! This simple adjustment solves the problem of a dark screen (due to dimming) yet it still allows you to easily read text on the screen without too much eye strain. The concept of F.lux is simple. During the day, your computer screen should resemble the sun. This means full brightness! However, as night time creeps closer, you wouldn’t want your screen to resemble the sun. Trust me, your eyes wouldn’t thank you for it. Reading about F.lux is not enough. You actually have to use it and test it yourself.

F.lux

Using F.lux is very simple. There are only a couple of configuration settings that needs adjustment. One of the biggest setting is telling the utility just where in the world you are! F.lux automatically activates when it determines that your timezone is approaching evening (sunset). F.lux accepts longitude and lattitude coordinates. Simply use Google to find the coordinates of your location and copy them into F.lux. This method technically works better than just relying on the actual time on a computer because the sun sets differently throughout the world.

The next important setting you will have to adjust is how intense you want the filter to be when F.lux activates. Remember, once activated, F.lux will apply a yellow tint filter over your entire screen. Not a part of it, but the whole screen. In the settings area, you can adjust the tint level for both when it is daytime and nighttime. In most cases, you’ll leave the daytime settings alone. In other words, F.lux will be deactivated during the day. It is the night time setting you’ll want to configure. You can adjust the slider by simply moving the circle ball left or right. Moving the slider left will apply a heavier tint while doing the opposite lessens the ‘yellowish’ tint effect.

On the bottom right corner, you can adjust the transition speed. In my opinion, this setting is not of high concern. The transition setting is how fast F.lux will transition from one tint level to another.

Finally, towards the bottom, you can choose to deactivate F.lux for an hour and return your screen to original colors. Why would you want to do this? Because F.lux applies a colored tint over your entire screen, users whose work relies on color (Photoshop, movie and picture editing) will be distorted and the true colors of the picture will not be represented correctly. Therefore, in these cases, F.lux must be deactivated. Dimming the screen or increasing the brightness level when F.lux is activated will have no effect in these scenarios.

Once you are done with the configuration changes, click the Done button. In the next screen, F.lux allows you a 24 hour preview of F.lux in motion. Simply click anywhere in the chart and you’ll see F.lux in action. If your current time zone is in the morning, you’ll eventually see your screen transition to a yellowish tint being applied and then removed again once the time resets. Once you have the settings configured to your liking, you normally wouldn’t have to touch F.lux again. Everything will happen automatically according to your location settings.

In the End…

I love F.lux. Being a person who works throughout the early morning with the lights off, F.lux allows me to more comfortably stare at my computer screen. At first, using F.lux was very weird. In fact, I’m sure many users who have tried this utility probably thought it to be stupid and useless. Who the heck wants to apply a yellow tint to the screen, which will distort all colors? After a couple of nights, I fell in love with this utility because it really does help. It’s not a gimmick, well at least in my opinion it’s not. Using a combination of F.lux and dimming my computer screen at the same time, my eyes are definitely more appreciative of me for doing so. I can’t guarantee you’ll like the effect but it’s definitely worth a try.

Unboxing and Physical Features

There’s really nothing much going on inside the box the Kindle Fire arrived in. When you open the box, you’ll get your lovely Kindle Fire, a mini-USB wall charger and a really tiny “Gett Started” guide that you probably wouldn’t even look at twice. That’s it. Amazon does not provide you with a mini-USB cable to help connect your Kindle Fire to your PC. I’m not sure why so many reviewers left this part out in their review. If you want to be able to sideload books, PDF documents, videos, music, pictures and other media from your computer to the Kindle Fire, you’ll have to purchase your own mini-USB cable. The good news is that the Kindle Fire uses a standard mini-USB cable and not a proprietary one (obviously, since they would have to include one in the box). Before you go out to your local retail outlet and spend $20 for such a cable, I suggest you go online to either Monoprice or Amazon themselves to purchase this cable at a fraction of the retail cost. Although you are not required to purchase this cable to use the Kindle Fire, you’ll be glad you did later on when you want to sideload large files to the device.

The Kindle Fire measure in at 7.5 inches x 4.7 inches and weighs in at approximately 14.6 ounces. In my hands, I do think that it’s a teeny bit on the heavy side. However, once you start using the device day in and day out, the weight shouldn’t be that big of a factor anymore. Though

The Kindle Fire rocks a 1024×600 resolution IPS screen. All you need to know is that the screen is absolutely gorgeous. If watching movies on the Kindle Fire is one of your main priorities, I’m pretty sure you won’t be disappointed. Colors are vibrant and really stand out. The viewing angle is pretty good too. You can tilt the device at odd angles and still be able to see the contents on screen. I’m not exactly fond of the glossiness of the screen, however. I will definitely look for a matte screen protector to help reduce the glare. The Kindle Fire comes with 8GB of internal storage but only 6.5GB of that is actually usable. This can be very limiting to some users.

And no, the Kindle Fire does not have 3G, Bluetooth, microphone, micro-SD card slot and camera functions.

Out of Box Experience

As soon as you turn the Kindle Fire on, it will walk you through the initial setup process. Mainly, you’ll get to select your time zone and connect to a wireless connection. Once having done so, Amazon automatically helps you register the device. When you order the device from Amazon’s website, your Kindle Fire’s serial number is tied to your Amazon account. Therefore, you don’t have to retype your username or password. This cannot be said if you have purchased the Kindle Fire at your local electronic retailer (Best Buy or Staples).The Kindle Fire will then begin to download and install an update. Once that completes, you’ll view a simple tutorial of how to navigate the Kindle Fire. When you finish that, you’ll then be greeted with the Kindle Fire home screen and you’ll be on your own! Also note that once your registration has completed, your 1-month trial of Amazon Prime will begin. You will receive an email from Amazon stating so.

Navigation

Navigating around the Kindle Fire is not difficult at all. It just takes some getting used too. You have your home screen and 7 different tabs at the top to help you get to your media. These tabs are Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, and Web. Within each tab with the exception of Web, you get to toggle the view of whether to look for media on the Amazon Cloud or locally on your Device. Amazon will happily store any digital content you’ve purchased from them on their servers. You can then choose to manually download that item on to your device if you so chose to. Remember, you only have 6.5GB of usable local storage. This is Amazon’s solution to the low storage problem.

Soft Buttons and Settings

There are no hard buttons on the Kindle Fire. The only physical button available is the power button. However, the Kindle Fire does incorporate ‘soft buttons’. On many Android based devices, you get the menu, home, back and search button on the bottom. The Fire also includes these same buttons but in order to use them, you have to tap the screen whenever you’re inside an app. The buttons will then pop out on the bottom of your screen.

The missing volume rocker is very disappointing. In order to adjust the volume, you’ll have to adjust it via a slider. Simply tap the navigation bar located on the top of the Kindle Fire to display the options. Here, you can choose to lock/unlock the screen orientation, adjust the volume, adjust the brightness, enable/disable Wi-Fi, syncing your contents with Amazon’s servers, and a More button. If you currently have music playing, you can also control the player from this bar. Clicking on the More button allows you access to more options and configuration settings. Such options include deregistering your Kindle, screen timeout, setting a lock screen password, date and time settings, keyboard settings, viewing remaining battery life and allowing the installation of ‘unknown’ applications.

The missing physical buttons is not that big of a deal, honestly. You get use to the soft buttons very quickly. Like many others, I am however saddened that Amazon didn’t include a volume rocker. I have no idea if this was to save on the overall cost of the device or not but the volume rocker is very important. The button detection on the Kindle Fire can also be considered pretty poor. Sometimes, you would click on the back button only to have it do nothing even though the button flashed. Controlling sliders can also be a challenge as the detection mechanism is not that good. This could be due to a limited amount of sensor placement which is again probably due to cutting the overall cost.

Home Screen

On the Kindle Fire home screen, you’ll see a search bar at the top and a row of big icons. This is called the Recent Carousel. Basically, any apps you open will get listed here with the most recent one in the front. Think of this as your  activity history. For example, let’s say you open the Pandora app to listen to music. You head back to the home screen and the Pandora app icon will be listed in at front of the carousel. Next, you open up a book you’ve purchased from the Kindle Store. You finish reading and close the app. That book icon (usually the cover art) will now be listed in the front with Pandora right behind it. You can only open an app in the carousel bar is that specific app is in the front. If you find an app you want to open but is 3 apps away/behind from the main one, you can tap on that icon and that will bring that app to the front. You then have to tap the icon in the center again to actually open it. To uninstall an app here, simply long-hold the app icon and choose the appropriate option. Right beneath the carousel is your favorites bookshelf. You can place the apps that you use most here. To do so, long-hold an app icon in the carousel and choose the appropriate option. You can also rearrange the app icon placement to your liking here.

Many will hate the carousel feature because Amazon offers you no control settings for it. Sometimes, you don’t want your activity history to be shown (such as a thumbnail display of your last website visit). I find the idea pretty neat but navigating in the carousel is pretty awkward. It is very sensitive and in many cases, you’ll flip right past the app you wanted to re-open. Often times you’ll wonder why even bother with using the carousel and instead opt to just open the app either in your favorites bookshelf (which is just a swipe up) or in the Apps view.

Newsstand

Here, you’ll find any Magazine subscription you’ve purchased from Amazon. They have a pretty vast selection of magazines for you to choose from. Many of these magazines have a 14-day free subscription so do take advantage of that offer. This allows you to get a feel for how reading a digital magazine on a 7″ tablet display will be. Pictures definitely look great and vibrant on the screen but unless you’re looking at a picture-only magazine, you’ll be doing a lot of reading. Sadly, a 7″ display is not big enough for this task. Words appear tiny no matter if the magazine is in landscape or portrait mode. You can either double-tap a column to automatically zoom-in or use pinch-to-zoom to manually enlarge it. Consider doing this for almost every page and it gets tedious very fast. Don’t want to do all that? Switch to Text mode and now the magazine will transform into an eBook where many elements of the magazine gets stripped and you’re presented with just the text. This is definitely easier to read but you lose that “magazine” feel.

My personal opinion of reading magazines on the Kindle Fire is not very pleasing. Although I don’t care that much about reading magazines on my Kindle Fire, I’m still disappointed with Amazon in this regard. Reading a magazine on the Kindle Fire can sometimes be down right frustrating. Page turns are somewhat slow and many a times, you’ll accidentally turn the page when trying to navigate around after you’ve zoomed in. Also, the magazine itself doesn’t even fully utilize all the screen estate of the Fire!

Books

Being as the Kindle name is generally associated with reading books, the Kindle Fire doesn’t break tradition. Books you’ve purchased in the past from the Amazon Kindle Store will be in the Cloud view. To begin reading a book, simply tap on it and the book will download onto your device locally. You can sort your library by author, recency, or title. Because the Kindle Fire sports an LCD type screen unlike the pearl e-ink display of the regular Kindles, long reading sessions will be less comfortable. Add the need to hold the Kindle Fire with one hand during this whole time and you might consider wanting to either refund the Fire or pick up a e-ink Kindle to go along with the Fire and dedicate it strictly to reading.  This was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make when I sold my Kindle Keyboard for the Kindle Fire. The Kindle reading app is your standard ordeal. You get to choose from 8 different text sizes, lines spaces, margins and color mode. By default, you’ll read on a white background with black text. You can also chose the reverse of this (for night time reading) or a sepia colored background. There’s also a couple of fonts you can choose from. By default, it is set on Georgia. Turning a page is as simple as swiping your finger across the page or tapping on the edge of the display. Page turns is not the fastest in terms of speed but it’s not the end of the world. There is also no Text-to-Speech on the Kindle Fire. Readers who use this feature will definitely be disappointed. Luckily, I don’t use this but am still shocked at seeing this feature removed.

After reading on my Kindle Fire for only a couple of days, I already miss my Kindle Keyboard. Due to the Fire being a touchscreen, I have to be careful not to accidentally tap the edge of the screen which will invoke a page turn. This can be uncomfortable for some (especially people with large fingers) because the bezel of the Fire is not that wide before it reaches to the touch screen. Because the bottom bezel is a little more wide than on the side, I find myself reading in landscape mode more often than portrait. Holding the Fire in landscape mode with one hand definitely makes the device feel heavier than when holding it in portrait mode. Another sacrifice I have to live with.

Music

Not much going in here. Albums and MP3 purchases made on Amazon will show up in the Cloud section. You can easily download these songs directly onto your device in situations where you’ll be using the Kindle Fire without a Wi-Fi connection. The other neat thing concerning your music library is that your Amazon Cloud Drive library can also be accessed here. Amazon gives every user 5GB of free storage to upload their personal music and documents (you can pay for more storage if you choose too). At the moment, only your music files can be accessed on your Cloud Drive account natively on the Kindle Fire. Maybe a firmware update later will also allow you to access your documents, pictures and movies as well. Oddly enough, clicking the Sync button did not refresh my cloud library. I’ve managed to upload some new songs in my Cloud Drive account but they were not reflected on the Fire. I found out you had to actually go into the settings menu and manually hit the “Refresh Cloud Drive” option before the new tracks appeared. As far as the music player goes, you have your standard button navigation such as last track, next track, pause, shuffle and repeat. Very basic but gets the job done. And yes, you can listen to music in the background while you open other apps.

You can also create your very own playlist as well. However, I found it a bit difficult to do so. When I tried to edit a playlist (namely adding songs), it showed me a list of all of my songs in the library. So naturally, I thought all I had to do was tap only the songs I want to add in the playlist. Well, that doesn’t work. In fact, nothing works. I can’t interact with the songs at all in this list. Tapping and swiping does nothing. To actually add the songs, I had to manually go to the song/album, find the tracks I wanted to add, long-hold the song and then finally choose to add it to my playlist. Very weird indeed. Not sure what I’m doing wrong here.

So far though, I’ve got no complaints here except for that weird playlist behavior. I’m not sure if its a bug or not. Generally, I’m very lax when it comes to this kind of stuff. As long as I can find my music and be able to play it in the background, I’m satisfied.

Video

The Video section allows you to play movie content purchased through Amazon. If you’ve rented or purchased a movie, you are allowed to download it onto your Kindle Fire for viewing. However, note that movies you sideload via USB onto the device will not show up in this view! It was confusing at first because naturally, you would think movies you’ve placed in the Video folder will appear here. It doesn’t. To view your movies and pictures, you need to actually open up the Gallery app (pre-installed by Amazon). Only then will you see your files. Weird but that’s how it works. By default, Amazon only supports MP4 and VP8 encoded movie files. I’m sure most of you have no idea what the latter codec even is. Don’t worry, just stick with MP4 and you should be good. Of course, nothing is good if you have to convert your videos before being able to view them on your Kindle Fire. The actual video player, again, is your standard ordeal player. Nothing fancy. You do have a 10-second quick rewind button at your disposal. This is useful when you run into those what-the-heck-did-they-just-say moments in a movie.

If you subscribe to Amazon’s Prime membership, you are allowed to stream an unlimited amount of movie and TV episodes from Amazon’s Prime video library. You get a free 1-month trial of Prime with your Kindle Fire so please take advantage of this offer! I am amazed at how fast videos started to play on my Kindle Fire. Remember, Amazon Prime videos are streaming only. No downloads. Picture quality is pretty amazing. Although the video library doesn’t include new movies or TV shows, there’s still a lot of content to be had here. I’m also sure that Amazon is actively seeking ways to improve this library for Prime members in the near future.

Consuming video from Amazon’s store is very satisfying and truly is one of the best things about the Kindle Fire. What’s not cool is the lack of codec support. I really don’t get what’s going on but is it really that much more difficult to give consumers the chance to be able to play the majority of their media files without having to convert them first? Maybe they did it purposely to persuade users converting is just not worth it and so they should just buy the movie from their store instead? However, there’s a simple way around this ‘unsupported’ codec issue and that is to install an app that will allow us to play back those movies natively on the Kindle Fire.

Docs

Here is where you would find your personal document files such as PDF and Mobi formats. One of the main reason I decided to get the Kindle is due to me reading a lot of PDF documents. Sad to say it but the built-in PDF reader on the Kindle Fire is average at best. Reading in portrait mode still requires you to zoom in but things get a little better in landscape mode. The worst part when reading in landscape mode however is that scrolling up or down on a page causes that page to wiggle left and right as well. Usually, this only happens when you zoom in. I found the reading experience a whole lot better when I used the official Adobe Acrobat Reader app. You are allowed to read Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents but you would not find the documents inside the Docs view. Instead, you’ll need to open the QuickOffice app instead. This app is preloaded onto your Kindle Fire and I’m sure can cause some initial confusion because if someone dragged a document into the Documents folder on the Kindle Fire, then that file should appear in the Docs tab! This is similar to the video issue talked about above.

While I am disappointed with the built-in PDF reader, I did manage to salvage the experience by using a different app. This is obviously not the ideal situation but I have no choice. This furthers my argument that the Kindle Fire needed a lot more tweaking before its public launch. If you are going to be reading lots of PDF documents on the Kindle Fire, take a look at the official PDF reader app from Adobe. The only bad thing about it is that you can’t bookmark a location.

Apps

In this view, you’ll see a list of all the apps either ready for you to install from the cloud or that which is already on your device. The view here is very simplistic. You have the same bookshelf view as in your Favorites area on the home screen. Each row contains 5 apps. The bad news is that you cannot manually rearrange the icons here! Your only options are to either sort them by recency or title. Amazon baked in a couple of apps onto your device that you can’t easily remove. This includes Quickoffice, Facebook, Audible, the Amazon app store, and the Pulse rss news reader among others. The Facebook app is a joke because all it does is take me to the site’s mobile version via the Silk browser. It other words, it’s just a URL shortcut. With the Kindle Fire, you are restricted to using only Amazon’s app store to purchase and install apps. Amazon is without question improving their app store as you read this so as time goes by, you should see more and more apps. If you want an app that is not available in the app store, you’ll have to manually sideload and install the app’s APK file (think of APK the equivalent to Windows .exe). The app store is easy to navigate and includes the usual categories to sort the apps by. Each day, Amazon includes a free app-of-the-day download and will be listed at the very top of the store for everyone to see. This is a great way for users to rack up apps without having to spend money on them.

It’s no question that apps can either make or break a tablet. Although the official Android Market includes hundreds of thousands of apps, many of them are pure rubbish. Amazon’s app store, although fewer in number, actually helps weed out the more useless apps. At least that’s how it should work in theory. Some of your favorite apps might be missing so if you really need them on your Kindle Fire, you’ll have no choice but to manually sideload them and install them that way.

Web

Amazon’s browser, called Silk, has garnered a lot of publicity and is actually one of the highlight of the Kindle Fire. The Silk browser is suppose to help web pages load faster because part of the processing is actually done on Amazon’s powerful web servers. My problem is not with the speed at which a site loads. I don’t think of myself as that important of an individual that I can’t even bother waiting a extra few seconds. My main gripe with the browser is in the navigation itself. When scrolling through some websites, you’ll often notice “lag” and jerkiness. Scrolling just doesn’t feel smooth. This isn’t apparent when you load the mobile version of a site. But when you begin loading the full desktop version though, you’ll feel it. The Silk browser is flash capable so obviously, it’s going to take extra juice to load some websites. You can turn flash off in the settings menu if you prefer. The slowness is not a deal breaker. It’s definitely bearable and like I said, it’s not always apparent. Other than that, I don’t really notice websites loading that much faster. Right now, the more people using Silk, the more data Amazon can gather and therefore, the better it can cache the more popular websites. If you don’t want Amazon processing your websites, you can obviously turn this feature off as well.

Right now, I am completely ditching the Silk browser and have instead opted to sideload the Opera browser in its place. Scrolling and zooming in on websites feel a lot faster. Again, I really don’t care all that much about how many seconds a page can load faster with one browser or another. I am positive that Silk will get better over time and I am even hoping a future firmware update will improve its speed. If a third-party browser can be so smooth, I don’t see why it should be acceptable for Amazon’s own browser to feel so sluggish operating on the same hardware.

Email

Amazon’s default email client is pretty barebones but it gets the job done, unless you need Exchange support. You’ll need an app for that. For the casual users, the email client should suffice. I’ve set up my main Gmail account on the Kindle Fire with ease. The email client does support IMAP but there are two things you have to configure before it will behave like actual IMAP. First, you have to go into the settings menu of your email account and select the option to also delete the emails on the Gmail server when you delete them on the Fire. If not, you’ll notice that emails you delete on the Fire will still be inside your other email clients. The purpose of IMAP is to synchronize your actions across all your email clients. I’m surprised this was turned off by default. Secondly, by default, emails you delete on the Fire will be dumped into a new folder called Trash. Your email account most likely already have a folder dedicated to email trash so in the settings menu, you have to tell the email client to dump the emails you delete on the Kindle Fire in the existing “trash” folder.

I don’t have too much complaints about the email client. Again, casual users should have no issues with emails on the Fire. One odd thing is that you cannot zoom in on emails. This includes either double tapping or pinching.

Comics

The Kindle Fire comes pre-loaded with the Comixology app. You can easily purchase new comics in this app and read them on the Kindle Fire. I have to say that the reading experience is pretty satisfying. The Kindle Fire’s screen can display almost 16 million colors and so comics being the colorful pictures that they are, really stand out. In many cases, the text will be too small to read in either landscape or portrait mode. There is no pinch-to-zoom feature here. However, you can simply double tap the screen and the app is smart enough to automatically zoom in on a comic strip. You then swipe the screen (right to left) and you’ll see either the next comic strip. I really like how this works. I’m not a big comic expert but I was a Spawn fan back in my high school years and so this should get a me a bit more interested agian. The Comixology app includes many free comics for you to download and read. At certain times, I sort of wished that reading magazines on the Kindle Fire would be similar to reading comics. Rather than having to manually focus and readjust the the zoom level for every page, all you have to do here is double-tap and that’s it!

Things I Don’t Like

There are a couple of issues that while it wouldn’t totally ruin your experience with the Kindle Fire, it’s still there nonetheless and can get frustrating at times.

Lack of Multitasking. I’m not expecting a tablet to replace my laptop but that doesn’t mean a user don’t need multitasking features! With an a previous Android device I used, I could simply long hold the menu button and a window would appear listing the previous 4-5 apps I’ve opened. Switching to any one of them was a simply click away. With the Fire, I have to head back to the home screen, open the second app, head back to the home screen and re-open the first app. I take a lot of notes when reading PDFs and having to constantly switch between the PDF reader and Evernote on the Kindle Fire is a pain.

Lock Screen. You are allowed to password protect your Kindle Fire by requiring the input of a password on the lock screen. You can either use alphabets, numbers, or a combination of both. The bad news is that the keyboard on the lock screen does not rotate to the correct orientation. It’s in a fixed position. Also, most users like to use only numbers for their password. However, the Kindle Fire makes this a hassle because the keyboard defaults to only showing the alphabets. To access the numbers keypad, you have to change the keyboard view first. The slider also doesn’t rotate to the correct orientation as with the keyboard. Oh and for some reason, the slider only slides from right to left. Maybe they were scared of a future infringement lawsuit?!

Button Detection. This definitely has to be a bug of some sort. Sometimes, pressing the back button (or Home for that matter) does absolutely nothing even though you were sure you tapped it correctly. Other times, due to lag, nothing happens at first so you press it again. You’ll then noticed that the button was actually pushed twice. This can get frustrating because you don’t know if you should press it again or not if the first time it didn’t succeed. Sliders can also give you some problem. Certain times, you were dead sure that you clicked on the slider circle. However, when you move the slider from left to right or vice-versa, nothing happens. Of course, no one is perfect and there are times when I also experience this issue on other devices but I notice it more so on the Kindle Fire.

Random Screen Refresh. Another bug I’m thinking. This doesn’t happen a whole lot but I’m sure you’ll catch it eventually. Sometimes, the screen will just refresh on you without warning. Nothing bad really happens as the icons just disappears for a second or so and then returns to normal. This might not be a bug in that maybe the Kindle Fire is doing something in the background (closing unused apps?) to force that refresh.

Wireless Reconnection. When you are not using your Kindle Fire and have turned off the screen, after a very brief time, it disconnects from your wireless access point to help save battery. When you unlock the device, it will automatically reconnect. However, it’s not as fast as I would like. Sometimes you forget about this issue and quickly launch an app only to be reminded that you are not connected online. Eventually, you’ll train yourself to watch for the wireless icon to reappear after unlocking the Kindle Fire prior to launching an app that requires Internet. I do notice that if I’m streaming Pandora and turn off the screen, the wireless connection will not turn off.

Recent Carousel. By default, the carousel on your home screen displays everything you’ve opened up recently. This can be a problem where website browsing is concerned because the last website you’ve visited is shown as a thumbnail here on the carousel. This isn’t a problem if you’re not doing anything you don’t want others to see but if not, be careful. Besides private websites, other items such books and videos can also cause you some embarrassment if someone saw them inside the carousel.   The worst part? There is no way to change the default behavior of the carousel. This issue surely has to be dealt with in future firmware upgrades. Also, being able to limit the amount of items showing the carousel would be great as well. I highly doubt a user will scroll through 20-30 apps in the carousel just to find an app.

Keyboard. I’m not really digging the on-screen keyboard. I’m not an expert typist when it comes to handheld electronics but I’ve gotten a lot better at typing on my iPhone now than when I first got it. It should be concerning that I have more problems typing on a 7″ device than on a much smaller one. It’s really hard to describe this. The Kindle Fire keyboard just feels really sensitive to the touch.

Hotness. The battery of the Kindle Fire gets hot. I’m assuming the battery is located at the bottom of the Kindle Fire because this is where I feel the heat. It doesn’t get hot enough for me to be too concerned about it as I’m not the only one experiencing this. Also, this doesn’t happen during every use.

In the End…

I definitely feel that there is a lot to like about the Kindle Fire, especially for the price you’re paying for it. Yet, the device clearly shows that it has a lot of irksome bugs to work out. The good thing in my opinion is that many of these irksome bugs can be fixed by a firmware upgrade should Amazon acknowledge those flaws. For $199, you can have your own tablet to help you consume your media whether on the couch, bedroom or on the go. Your music, movies, books, or magazines can all be purchased from Amazon and quite easily I might say. Amazon really did a great job baking in their digital content services onto the Kindle Fire. With that being said, you’ll still get a pretty decent experience even if you don’t exactly tap into Amazon’s economy. Just know that underneath the Kindle Fire lurks the Android 2.3 operating system. Whether or not Amazon will update this in the future remains to be seen.

While the Kindle Fire is very usable out of the box, I feel that you’ll get a lot more out of the device if you poke around the web and learn how to sideload third-party apps which isn’t included in the Amazon app store. Sideloading apps is not difficult at all and requires you to switch just one option in the Fire’s setting menu. Being that this is Amazon’s first entry into the tablet market, I do get the occasional feeling of being a beta tester. Like I said, the Kindle Fire is far from perfect and so you’ll need to put some work in to improvise. The built-in Silk browser and PDF reader is such examples in my scenario. They’re not bad. It’s just that there are better alternatives out there.

To sum up this ridiculously long review, my advice to you is to your research prior to buying the Kindle Fire! At $199, this tablet isn’t meant for everyone. What the Kindle Fire can do is provide you with an affordable tablet to help you consume your digital media. Because the device does not have 3G capabilities, you’ll have to think about what to actually store on your device prior to heading out. There are sacrifices you’ll need to make if you do indeed get this tablet and right now, the only saving grace for all things wrong with it is knowing the fact that Amazon is behind it. As time goes by, more apps will make it to Amazon’s app store, better movies will be available for Prime members to stream and more importantly, software bugs will be ironed out and new features will be implemented or exiting one’s improved upon.

Privacy Concerns

The Problem

OK, so maybe you don’t want to be spied upon. You have your reasons for not wanting to, obviously. So now what? Well, here’s the other problem: it’s not apparently clear to casual users on how to disable third party companies from tracking your browsing history. In fact, many users do not even know that they are actively being tracked upon visiting a website! It’s not like there’s a big sign on a website that says, “Hey there visitor! Your browsing history is now being tracked by xxx companies!”. Many websites are however, required to mention somewhere on their website about their privacy policy. Usually, this link can be found way towards the bottom of the site. Look for either a link that says “Privacy Policy”, “Terms of Use” or something of that nature. This policy should detail about how the website is gathering your data and whatnot and what they can and cannot do with it. In normal circumstances, no one really reads what is on this page let alone being able to find it in the first place. You see, our goal here is not to negotiate. We are here to obliterate these tracking mechanisms!

The Solution

In order to stop telling third party agencies from tracking our online behavior and activities, we need to actually tell them! That’s right folks. By default, we can be tracked by these so called tracking elements without knowing any better. Unless we tell them otherwise, nothing happens. Well, that’s about to change. From my limited knowledge, many advertising agencies rely on tracking cookies to monitor your behavior. These cookie files are nothing more than simple files that get stored on your computer whenever you visit a website. Are all cookies bad? The answer is simply no. However, this subject can be an entire new post by itself so I won’t get into that debate here. What you need to know is that by default, websites get permission to store these cookies on your computer (unless you blocked all cookies from entering your system in the first place). Unless you erase your cookie store from within your browser, these cookie files usually have a long life span and will remain on your computer. There are different types of cookies and some do expire after a short period of time but for advertising cookies, I’m sure they have a very long life.

Want to delete these cookies? Sure! Go right on ahead! However, know that upon re-visiting the site with the offending cookie, it will get blasted right down to your computer again. Is all hope lost? Of course not! It turns out that there are bad cookies and good cookies. The bad cookies are the one’s I’ve just talked about. The good cookies are called the opt-out cookies. These specific cookies, once created and stored on your computer, tells a specific advertising agency that you do not want to be tracked by them and therefore to leave them the heck alone. Think of opting out as unsubscribing to a service. Remember what I said earlier in that in order for agencies to not track you, you have to specifically tell them? Well, these opt-out cookies is doing exactly that. So how do we start “opting” out?

Ghostery

Ghostery is a free add-on available on today’s most popular browsers. Once installed, each time you visit a website, Ghostery will quickly do an initial scan for third-party presence on that site. Hidden elements that are not shown in the site’s source code can still get detected by Ghostery. This is effective in scenarios where some companies really don’t want you to know about them and so use sneaky techniques to embed themselves onto that site. Once the scan has completed, Ghostery will show you the list of tracking agencies found. From here, you can easily opt-out of these companies or learn more about them. The reason I am using Ghostery is due to its simplicity Unlike other more advanced Javascript blocking tools such as NoScript, I just wanted a tool that helps me track which advertising network is present on a given website and block them from appearing again.

Getting started with Ghostery is very easy. Download the add-on for your current browser, install, configure some settings and you’re all set! Upon initial startup, you’ll be presented with Ghostery’s wizard. I suggest you go over each page. However, you can also tweak Ghostery’s settings and behavior after this wizard completes as well.

1. After the welcome page, Ghostery allows you to opt-in to GhostRank. This service allows you to send anonymous usage of the add-on to Ghostery’s team and developers. There are specific information they collect from you and more information can be gleaned by reading their FAQs page. In essence, by turning on GhostRank, you get to help out Ghostery by providing useful statistics and information in hopes that they themselves better learn how advertising networks work. Of course, you are not required to enable GhostRank to use Ghostery.
2. Upon detecting third party elements on a webpage (which will happen pretty much on every website you visit), Ghostery will alert you. By default, this alert will pop-out in the top right corner of your browser and will remain visible for 15 seconds. We can configure the settings later but for now, choose to enable Alerts.
3. As with many services that relies on blocking things, there must be a way to update that master list. Ghostery is no exemption. You can choose to enable Auto-Update to have Ghostery automatically download and update that master list without your intervention. I suggest you turn this on.
4. The last option you configure is pretty confusing in my opinion. I left the first option (enable Blocking) off because I personally don’t know how that works. Cookie Protection allows Ghostery to automatically help you block cookies from advertising network domains on their list.

Once the wizard completes, we can begin using Ghostery. However, there is one more thing we should configure. Click on the Ghostery icon in your browser’s add-on bar and select Options from its menu. Here you can configure where to place the Alert Bubble  for Ghostery and how long it should be visible for. Remember, this bubble appears anytime you visit a website and third party elements are found. This will happen for many of the websites you visit. So that means you’ll be seeing this bubble a lot (assuming you didn’t disable it altogether). The Alert Bubble will only show you the items it finds on a website. Clicking on it won’t do anything. To block a third party element, you will still have to manually click on the Ghostery icon, which I’ll go over in a minute. As far as all the other options go, sticking to the defaults seems pretty safe. You are also able to have Ghostery delete Flash and Silverlight cookies on exit.

Using Ghostery

There’s not much to utilizing Ghostery. Once installed and configured, you’ll see a bubble alert each and every time you visit a website listing the third party elements it caught. These can range from advertising networks to other things. To block an element, simply click on the Ghostery icon, mouse over to the element and choose to block it. That’s it! From then on, that company, advertising agency or whatever it is will be blocked from loading on your computer/browser. When you visit another site that has that same element installed, it will also be prevented from loading! Because there are so many networks out there, it can be pain to figure out what each one does. Ghostery allows you to easily glean more information on a particular network as well. Instead of blocking the element, select the “What is xyz?” link where xyz is the element in question. Ghostery will provide some basic information about that element.

The problem with going all out and blocking each and every element you see is that some of them are necessary for the page to function correctly. As an example, head over to ESPN.com. In Ghostery, block the ForeSee element and refresh the page. You’ll then notice that the ESPN scoreboard has now completely disappeared! It is cases like these in where you have to be careful. You could block a third party element on one website and because that same element will also be blocked on future websites, it could unintentionally break something. Fortunately though, you can whitelist a domain in Ghostery. Simply visit the site, click the Ghostery icon and select the appropriate option to have that site whitelisted. From then on, all elements on that site will be able to run while the offending element will still be blocked in all other domains you visit. This is a very handy feature.

One missing feature that would make Ghostery more accessible is an export/import function. I use my laptop the most and so I’ve blocked many third party elements within Ghostery. When I install the add-on on my desktop computer, I have to start from scratch again. It would be awesome if we could export to a file containing a list of all the third party elements we’ve blocked and import it to a new installation of Ghostery on another machine. This would save a lot of time in my opinion.

Admission of Guilt and Warning

As of right now, I am not proud of myself. I have around 8 different third party elements on AnotherWindowsBlog. It’s party my fault because I have deployed 3 different site tracking utilities where I only needed one. Some elements are completely out of my hands. When I install some useful plugin in WordPress, some necessary elements are loaded by default. Usually, a company will tell you first hand if this is the case. In many scenarios, you’ll definitely come across third party elements that you’ll see over and over again. Such includes anything with the words Google in front of it, Twitter, Facebook, DoubleClick, Comscore Beacon and a host of others.

In the end, I want to conclude that while Ghostery gives us an easy way to block third party elements from tracking our activity, it can also have unintended side effects. For the most part, blocking advertising agencies won’t really have an impact on your browsing experience as many things are performed “behind the scenes”. There are some elements that I chose not to block such as anything that starts with the words “Google” in front of it. Also, please remember that not all cookies that track your behavior is necessarily evil. For many bloggers, I need to get a sense of where and how visitors are landing on my site. To do so, I have to deploy some type of tracking mechanism such as Google Analytics which will no doubt be listed in Ghostery. The problem with third party tracking agencies is you don’t really know how they will behave. Unfortunately, many users will never know any of this. There are dozens and dozens of advertising and other network agencies that are interested in what you do. Not feeling particularly loved? Just hop on the net and know that at least someone is interested in what you do!

The Advantage of Laser Printers Over Inkjet Printers

Samsung ML-1865w

The printer I’ve just purchased is the Samsung ML-1865w. This is a monochrome printer so yes, it will only print in black. Users who are always on the lookout for killer deals online will immediately recognize this laser printer as the one that occasionally drops down to the incredible price of just $49.99. I pretty much check out Slickdeals on a daily basis to always be on the lookout for killer deals and when this offer came up again at Office Depot, I finally jumped on the deal like a madman. That’s right folks. For just $50, you can have you very own laser printer.

Currently, the cheapest price for this printer model on Amazon and eBay is around $79.99. This is still a good deal if you are looking for a personal laser printer.

Out of the Box

Not much going on here. You have your usual instructional booklet and warranty information, a CD containing the printer driver software, a USB cable, power cable, and the Samsung ML-1865w printer itself. The printer is very low profile and is not a bit bulky at all. You can see in the picture below how this printer fares next to my 14″ laptop. I don’t have much room as it is and so this printer is perfect if you don’t want something hogging all your precious desk space! In fact, at first glance, someone might actually mistaken the printer for a mini trash bin! On a side note, this printer comes with a starter toner cartridge which gives a yield of about 700 or so pages. However, don’t be shocked if what you’ll eventually get out of it is much, much less.

Wired Setup

Installing this Samsung laser printer is pretty much as simple as it gets. It honestly takes no longer than 6-10 minutes. Now, you could use the provided CD disc to install the printer driver but you’re not a amateur and so you’re going to do what big boys do and download the latest and greatest driver directly from the manufacturer instead. Visit the Samsung Support website and punch in your printer model (ML-1865w). You should then be able to download the latest user manual and driver software.

If you’ve followed the instruction booklet that came with the manual, then at this point your printer is already turned on and connected to your computer. However, Windows 7 will claim that it can’t find the driver for the device, which we’re going to provide right now. Once you have the driver package extracted and run, you’ll be presented with the install wizard. Only proceed next if you will be using the printer via USB. If you are going the wireless route, skip to the next section.

To install the printer, you basically just follow the on-screen instructions by clicking on the big Install Now link and keep hitting Next. No, I’m serious. That’s it. The software should then detect the printer and all you have to do is tell it to proceed. Once the driver is installed, go ahead and print a test page. Once the page prints, you’re all done. No sweat right?

Wireless Setup

I’ve been reading a lot of user complaints on how hard it is to setup this printer for wireless printing. Well, they’ve either have a very special wireless network setup or they can’t follow instructions that well. I honestly expected a challenge myself because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Well, there’s none. Here is what I did to configure the wireless setup on the Samsung ML-1865w.

1. Run the setup program you’ve downloaded from Samsung’s website or from the included CD. Rather than selecting Install Now, you’re going to click the Wireless Setting and Installation link instead.
2. Your printer will then begin picking up all the wireless connections it can find and display it back to you. Your home wireless network should be in this list!
3. Once you have selected your wireless network, it will then ask for the wireless network key.
4. Next, you’ll confirm the settings. By default, the printer will use DHCP to obtain an IP address for itself. This is OK in most situations. If you want to, you can assign the printer its own dedicated TCP/IP settings by clicking on the Change TCP/IP button in this window.
5. Next, you’ll confirm the printer connection.
6. In the software installation screen, be sure to install the printer driver. You can optionally choose to install the Smart Panel application as well.

Now that our wireless printer has been configured, we can now manually connect to it within Windows. You may or may not have to perform this step. If you look inside Devices and Printers (hit the Start button), you might see the printer already listed. If not, we have to manually connect to it. You would also have to perform the following procedures on any other computer in your home network that wants to print to this printer as well.

1. Start off by heading into the Devices and Printers applet. You can do so by hitting the Start button and it should be on the right panel. Next, click on the Add a Printer button at the top of the window. Windows will now walk you through the wizard to get you connected to the printer. Please make sure that your Samsung printer is turned on and connected to your wireless network before proceeding! In the first wizard window, select the “Add a network, wireless, or Bluetooth printer” option.
2. Next, Windows will search your home network for available printers. Your Samsung should pop right in the list after a few seconds or so. Select it and click Next.
3. Windows will now ask you to pick the right printer driver to use with this printer. Luckily, our printer device is on the supported list of printers. Choose Samsung in the manufacturer section and scroll down until you see the “Samsung ML-1865w Series”. Select it and proceed. If you do not initially see the printer in the list, have Windows update the list. Your computer will obviously need to be online and the update will take a while, so be patient.
4. In the next window, opt not to share the printer.
5. Finally, set this printer as the default if you wish to. Here, you can also print a test page to confirm everything is working.
6. Head back to the Devices and Printers applet and you should now see your Samsung printer in the list. That’s it.

Printer Noise and Speed

For a laser printer, this Samsung is very quiet. Coupled with its small form factor, this printer is a winner for users or college students who need to work in a limited area. When you initially turn on the printer, it takes a couple of seconds for it to warm up. Again, the noise is very tolerable and nothing dramatic. Once the warm-up process completes, you can begin printing.

As far as speed goes, the official listing for this model is 19ppm (pages per minute). This is way more than enough for casual users. If you only need to print a couple of pages per session, this printer is more than qualified to get the job done. Officially, this printer has a monthly duty cycle of up to 5,000 pages. Therefore if you need to print more than that per month, you’ll want to look for a different model. I’ve included a video below in where I try to show you the speed of the printer. I don’t really have anything to print at the moment and I don’t like to waste paper just for the sake of a demonstration so in the video, you’ll only see the printer print about 5 pages. I’ve tried putting the camera up close to the printer in hopes of capturing the sound it makes as well when printing.

Quality

Not much to say on print quality. If you’ve ever seen a printout from a laser printer before, then this printer is right up that alley. Nothing special, nothing fancy. It just gets the job done. Personally, these cheap laser printers are great for printing out reports and other things that contain mainly of words and tables. Of course, it will also print pictures and whatnot but don’t expect it to rival that of black inkjet printers. For that, you’ll need a much more expensive laser printer than this one. For the price I paid for this, it’s worth every penny.

Maintenance

Laser printers don’t usually require a lot of maintenance like inkjet printers unless you have a defective model of some sort. These laser printers can print thousands and thousands of pages before anything needs changing. The best part is, a lot of problems you experience from a laser printer can be remedied by simply changing the toner cartridge. However, this is not true for every printer model. Besides keeping the unit clean of dust and whatnot, I’m just going to let this printer sit on my desk until I need to use it. The bad part to this is I will have no idea whether or not the printer I purchased is defective or not. By rarely using the printer, it won’t undergo a “stress-test” of sort. Other users complain that their printer go bad after only a couple of weeks. That’s a good thing in this retrospect because they at least now know to return it or to fix it. As far as changing toner cartridges go, it’s as simple as lifting the printer cover up, removing the old cartridge by pulling on the handle and inserting the new one in until it snaps into place.

Extra Features

There’s not a whole lot of special features on this laser printer. It does however, have one energy saving ability. Having your laser printer power on and off can drain a lot of electricity. Ever noticed your lights flickering just a bit right when you turn on a laser printer? With the Samsung ML-1865w, you can enable energy-saving mode by simply pressing once on the power button (assuming printer is already turned on). When you need to print again, simply click the button again. This is a useful feature if you have a household of busy people who need to print on a daily basis. Rather than turning the printer on/off, simply use this energy saving feature instead and only turn it off when you are sure you won’t be using the device for an extended amount of time.

In the End…

I am extremely happy with this printer. I still couldn’t believe I got a laser printer for less than the price of some toner cartridges! I can finally rid my hands of ink sucking printers such as my Canon MP530. Too bad I can’t completely get rid of it because I still need it for its scanning capabilities! But anyways, I don’t have to worry anymore about ink cartridges drying out and clogging or whatever else happens when I don’t use these printers for a while.

Pricing and Specs

The Nook Tablet can be yours for the price of $250. This is a $50 price increase to the Kindle Fire. Of course, with the price increase there’s guaranteed to be hardware improvements and whatnot. The Nook Tablet comes in the same 7″ screen flavor as the Kindle Fire but weights .5 ounces less at 14.1 as compared to 14.6. The Nook Tablet however, is a big longer in length than the Kindle Fire being at 8.1″ to just 7.5″ respectively.

As with the Fire, the Nook Tablet also includes only a Wi-fi connection point and so users wanting a 3G experience when they travel will be left out in the dark. The device boosts 11.5 hours of reading or 9 hours of video (wireless off) on a single charge. The Fire includes 8 hours of continuous reading and 7.5 hours of video viewing (wireless off). Please note that the purported battery life estimates is never accurate and usually what you get in real world usage is less. Surprisingly, the Nook Tablet claims to be able to give you a complete battery charge in only 3 hours as opposed to 4 hours on the Fire, even though the latter gives you less total battery time usage.

The Video Content

UPDATE 11/09: Amazon just issued a press release today saying that big name services such as Netflix, Pandora, Twitter and Rhapsody will indeed make their way to the Kindle Fire, day one!

UPDATE 11/11: Amazon just announced that Hulu Plus and ESPN Scorecenter will also be available when you get your Kindle Fire! Having both Netflix and Hulu Plus services on the Fire takes away most competitive advantage of the Nook Tablet.

Having a faster device is useless if the digital content service that revolves around the device sucks. The Nook Tablet will also run a customized version of the Android operating system just like the Kindle Fire. Barnes & Nobles also have a digital economy similar to that of Amazon and so it is also going the route of revolving their Nook Tablet around their digital content services. However, that’s where the comparison stops. Barnes & Nobles digital economy cannot be compared to that of Amazon. Amazon has their own music store, movie store, eBook store, app store and their unlimited video streaming service for Prime members. B&N have their own eBook store (which also includes magazines) and well, their own app store. That’s pretty much it unless I’m not mistaken. Basically, Amazon has a lot more of their own digital content to offer than B&N. However, B&N does have a trick up its sleeves.

It’s no secret that Amazon wants you to buy their Kindle Fire so that you can buy more “stuff” from them. While both tablets are technically locked into their own respective services, the Nook Tablet is a little more open in the video streaming area. Why? Because they don’t have their own dedicated video streaming service like Amazon does, they have to look elsewhere. Besides, why buy a tablet with a gorgeous looking screen if you’re not going to be streaming movies on it? In the Nook Tablet’s case, B&N “outsourced” this service to Netflix and Hulu. Pre-loaded onto every Nook Tablet are the Netflix and Hulu apps which allow you to stream movies and videos directly onto your tablet. Because these services conflict with Amazon’s own, do not be surprised if none of these apps will be offered on the Kindle Fire, ever.

Here is the big decision you will have to make if you are considering either devices: do you want to pay $79 a year for Amazon’s Prime membership or Netflix’s/Hulu’s $7.99 (equals out to about $96 a year) a month streaming service? If you want the latter, stay away from the Kindle Fire. The only way to help you make this decision easier is if you personally browse through each service’s catalog and see what movies and TV shows are being offered. Personally, I’m not too fond of Amazon Prime’s video library selection. This service was included as a “bonus” to Prime members. Both Netflix’s and Hulu’s streaming services are dedicated in trying to offer you the best selection of content available because that’s what you’re ultimately paying for! But whose to say Amazon won’t catch up in the future?

The App Economy

As with Amazon’s App store, I am fairly disappointed in what I am seeing inside B&N’s own app store. Both tablets are locked into their own respective app store. Both Amazon and B&N do not allow you access to the open Android Marketplace. As you can already guess, the customized app store by both companies are seriously lacking in apps that I see myself using. I’m going to say this once: when it comes to apps, it’s not about quantity but quality! I don’t care if an app store have 500,000 apps or whatever. Many of them will not even see the light of day. Sad, but its true. What I rather want is you trying to give me the apps that I, along with many other users, would want to use instead.

Here’s the other kicker: B&N app store charges more for apps. For example, Angry Birds and Doodle Jump cost $2.99 from the B&N app store where it’s only $.99 from Amazon. That’s a whopping triple price increase! Now of course this isn’t always the case but it’s not a good sign nonetheless. Why are they doing this? Because it goes back to the whole profit thing. B&N’s main source of digital content profit comes from users purchasing eBooks and apps from their store. These two services can they truly call their own. Because they don’t have as many sources of digital revenue as Amazon, I can see why they are charging more for a popular app but this is not good in the consumers point of view.

Although I’m disappointed with Amazon in the app store department, I still have more faith in them to get things right than B&N simply because of the fact that the former is a larger company. I’m not sure what goes on behind the scenes to secure an app into their own marketplace but both of these companies need to step it up that’s for sure.

Rooting

This is a big issue for many and one that has a lot to do with whether a tablet has a Micro-SD slot or not. B&N Nook Color (their first attempt at a colored screen eReader/tablet thingy) allowed users to root the device and install the fully open Android operating system that many other Android-based tablets are doing (Samsung Galaxy tablet, for example) instead of being locked into B&N and Amazon’s own customized interface and economy. Doing so allows the user to access the full Android Marketplace and download apps that they couldn’t get from the locked app store of B&N and Amazon. Rooting the device consisted of downloading and installing a modified OS, such as the popular Cyanogen Mod, onto a Micro-SD card, perform some specific procedures to root the device and BAM! The user could then choose between booting the customized OS or back to the default. With the Nook Tablet, many hardcore users are more interested in this tablet over the Kindle Fire simply because of the fact that it has the Micro-SD slot.

The problem with the Kindle Fire in this regard is that it doesn’t have a Micro-SD slot! Amazon openly admits that it doesn’t really care if someone roots a device. They are just making it harder and make no mistake about it, you do so at your own risk . Without the Micro-SD slot, rooting the Kindle Fire is possible as many have said but once done so, it will be very hard if not impossible to uninstall it (feel free to correct me on this). This has issues such as losing your warranty on the device and not being able to access Amazon’s digital content, etc.

All in All…

This competition of deciding who will ultimately dominate the $200-$250 7″ tablet market is getting very interesting. It’s weird to see how so much talk about tablets are in full circulation and for once, the Apple iPads are not hogging the spotlight. If you get right down to it, there is always a place in our hearts (or wallets for that matter) for budget-friendly devices. If these tablets prove to be successful, which I have a good feeling it will, Apple surely will have to counter it. I doubt they will lower the price of the current 10″ iPads but come out with a smaller version similar to that of the Fire and Nook Tablet instead. Who knows huh?

Right now, comparing the Nook Tablet with the Kindle Fire comes down to making a few big decisions and ultimately, sacrifices. If you get the Kindle Fire, you have to be dedicated to the Amazon’s ecosystem to get the most out of the device. Getting the Nook Tablet allows you access to Netflix and Hulu services for video streaming but there’s not much else going on in terms of digital content from B&N themselves. This wouldn’t be a problem if users had free reign over the Android Marketplace but this isn’t the case (as with the Kindle Fire). For an extra $50, you get double the amount of RAM and on-board storage space than the Fire with an included built-in microphone and Micro-SD slot for storage expansion and possible root. Both devices have cloud storage for your content although I’m not sure exactly how Nook Cloud works at the moment. Right now, I’m still betting on the Kindle Fire coming out on top although the Nook Tablet is definitely an enticing device considering it allows you access to two of the biggest video streaming services out there.