No, there’s not a virus on the new Kindle Fire, but you wouldn’t know that if you tried to get support for the disappearing Box.Net for Android app. One of the many pre-written responses Amazon’s support agents throw out is an assertion that your problems must be caused by anti-virus software. If you point out that there isn’t anti-virus software on the Kindle, they write back to assure you that there’s no anti-virus software on the Kindle.
lol
It’s not been an impressive product release so far, for all that it happened a day early. First up, the first-power-on registration process was broken and required making a 20 minute call to tech support. Up next is the way many apps aren’t available for the Fire, even though they appeared in the TV add for the Fire, like IMDB. Hell, the front page of IMDB has three different links to the Kindle Fire, but you’d be a sucker to buy it for that, since it doesn’t actually friggin work on this device.
UPDATE: Interesting, in addition to lacking support for the IMDB app, they also don’t support the dropbox app, though they will auto-suggest box.net’s app instead. No Spideroak app either. I’d wonder if they weren’t preventing cloud competition by excluding these apps, but all three use Amazon S3 for their back-end, so it seems kinda random rather than malicious.
UPDATE2: How odd. The IMDB app is suddenly on my home page on the fire, but the app’s page on the amazon app store still says the fire isn’t supported.
UPDATE3: Looks like not a single epub reader is allowed on the kindle, even though there are dozens in the app store, some that even say they’d work on my decrepit G1 phone….
The latest replacement Kindle DX died tonight.
Was reading along just fine, went to turn the page, and no response. Tried all the standard reset options, no response.
Sigh.
UPDATE: I didn’t want to spend my saturday night on the phone with tech support, so I spent the night reading from the original pdf, on my mac. This morning, I start the call-me-back process for kindle support, and grab the kindle to have ready to talk about, and notice that it’s got the screensaver on. That’s different that the blank and unresponsive I saw last night, so I hang up before support answers, and start to see what’s what.
The device lost where I last was reading, of course, and flaked out twice on actions I’ve requested. In one case, the screen saver came back on in the middle of navigating the main menu. In the other case, it ignored a button press to open a book from said same menu. Now, it seems OK. We shall see.