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Originally Posted by conan50
I hate to say this, but after having 2 Kindle Fires, and giving them away, I don't recommend them unless you are primarily using them as ereaders. They have good hardware, and are reliable, but they are pretty horrible to try to use as a real computer, you'll be much happier with a full Android operating system and feel less limited.
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Back when, I saw a number of people looking at Kindle Fires and Nook tablets as cheap Android tablets - just root them.
I recommended spending $50 more and getting a Nook tablet, as the specs were better and they would have a happier experience. (Lack of support for external cards in the Fire is a major negative.)
The Fire's virtue is that it's cheap. Amazon doesn't want you to use it as a general purpose computer. It's a media consumption device for media you will buy from Amazon.
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I prefer e-ink to read from generally, but with a decent screen, tablets can do more, offer more options, handle multiple formats, and they have text-to-speech. A tablet also allows a bit of multitasking in between reading.
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eInk is out for me because too much of what I do requires color, and that includes reading books. (I have illustrated volumes on Impressionism and Cubism I'm reading on my tablet at the moment. No, full color art does not translate acceptably to B&W when part of the point is the artist's use of color in the work...)
I haven't had call to use text-to-speech, but support for multiple formats was a requirement. I've accumulated volumes in ePub, Mobi and PDF format among other things, and being able to read any of them was a requirement. FBReaderJ handles ePub and Mobi, and calls a PDF viewer for things in PDF format.
And Android tablets certainly multitask. There are always an assortment of system processes and services running in the background, and I can have several apps active and switch between them, with the foreground app taking over and the others asleep.
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I wouldn't write off a tablet based only on the experience with a Kindle Fire. As someone suggested earlier, pick up an inexpensive Android tablet with an sdcard slot for ebook storage and give it a try.
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That's precisely what I did. I assumed it would make a dandy eBook viewer even if I did nothing else with it, and it is, but I'm coming up with other things I can do with it.
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Dennis