Worrisome Title

Upon reading the title of an Economist article my brother sent me, I thought I might want to ready my wife to return the Kindle Fire she has no doubt already ordered for me for Christmas. The title is Fire in the Hole (here) and it is worth reading for anyone considering a Fire.

I found the most prescient passage to be:

"One big difference between the iPad and the Fire was that the latter was shipped preloaded with Babbage's Amazon account, and thus linked to all of the digital purchases he ever made on Amazon, as well as music uploaded to its Cloud Drive, divided neatly into categories like newsstand, video, music and books. The appropriate aisles of Amazon's digital store load by default in each tab. Purchases past and future can be also downloaded onto the device or streamed from the cloud. The process is so simple that one might expect Apple to have come up with it. (Accessing content on the iPad is incomparably more finicky.) The streaming option is particularly nifty, especially since the Fire boasts little storage—just 8 gigabytes, compared with an iPad's 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes."

This is exactly what I'm looking for. I'm not looking to dump my library of books and start over, I like having all those with me when I go from reader to reader. I want my content.

Nevertheless, the passage that should make all Apple devotees like my brother feel secure is the last:

"For all that, the Fire is not an iPad killer. But nor does it need to be. Mr Bezos has built a clever little gizmo which, especially at its low price, may yet put a dent in Apple's dominant, even overweening position. Consumers can only benefit."