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Apple's free streaming video is pretty much all educational - but I've lost countless hours watching Stanford's series on Energy - in particular, I highly recommend Their Global Climate and Energy Project. Start with Solar Energy 101 - and see if you can avoid being hooked.

Obviously - there is also all of the podcasts from NPR, 5by5.tv, etc...

I've been happy with the free content I get from Apple - I probably spend, on average, 6-8 hours a week listening/watching it.

> "Complaining about free streaming content is not a great way to start a review. How's the streaming content that Apple provides?"

I'll bite. I really don't like the Prime free Videos thing. It's not the lack of selection (though that is an issue), it's that there is zero discoverability.

Amazon's concept of "recommendations" is quaint and still entirely obsessed with the concept of a physical product, and fails dramatically when put alongside modern recommendation engines like Netflix, or any number of smaller startups that deliver better content recommendations. Netflix's content selection isn't terribly awesome either, but it doesn't feel lacking because the system does such a fine job of finding you something to watch.

And it's not that Amazon tries to build out a good discoverability system,and it just isn't any good. It simply doesn't have one. When you drop into the Video Store, almost none of the things it shows you are meant to be relevant to you. We see global bestsellers. We see new releases. We see nothing relevant to the user, and that's a pretty big problem for a device whose mission is to help customers discover content and buy it.

The same applies to the MP3 Store. Where Apple has Genius, Spotify/Rdio have social features and tastemaker-based recommendations... the Music Store on the Fire has... nothing.

I'm really disappointed with mine. The out of box experience is so good. You pull it out of the box and power it on, it's already registered to your Amazon account. You're led through a simple setup process as good as iPad with iOS5. You even get these cute chalk-mark-scribbles tutorial overlays when you first land on the home screen.

And then you drop off a damn cliff, and 20 minutes later you realize the device is pretty vacuous. About the only part of the entire device where I don't have serious issues is the e-reader, thank God.

Going off on a bit of a tangent...

modern recommendation engines like Netflix ... the system does such a fine job of finding you something to watch.

I strongly disagree (about Netflix). I think their recommendation engine is dismal. It pretty much never finds me things that I'm interested in.

To me, the strongest evidence that Netflix is after a red herring is the Netflix Challenge. The goal was an algorithm to provide the most accurate ratings, but I think that phrasing the question in that way makes it almost irrelevant.

The real question should be: what movies will this user likely find to be very good. That means that a precise rating is never necessary, and no rating is needed at all for things that are outside the 4-5 range. And an algorithm to find movies that simply have a high likelihood of high scores is a very different beast from an algorithm that can precisely rate movies across the whole spectrum.

I think they're still working on recommendations, the app is still quite basic. It shows similar products well, but doesn't try and tell me what I want. To be fair, I have not bought/watched much video content on Amazon and on the website the recommendations are pretty sparse because of that (I have bought Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld DVD sets, so the recommendations are mostly from those).

When I go to the Music store on Kindle it has recommendations for me on the front page (I haven't bought music on Amazon for a while so they are a bit out of date, but it took me a second to figure out why all the top albums were so good). If I uploaded my music to Amazon Cloud I'd expect the recommendations could be better--Amazon currently only knows a very small part of my music collection.

For a comparison, I just logged onto the music store from my iPhone and the "Genius" recommendations on there are as bad as they could be, despite Genius working great on my desktop. Apple has the benefit of knowing all my music, so this is a little disappointing. It seems they go by artist mainly and don't weight by play count (I have some popular albums, albeit mostly un-listened and they drove almost all recommendations.) I would heavily weight by play count, that's the best tell that the music is actually enjoyed.

> "If I uploaded my music to Amazon Cloud I'd expect the recommendations could be better"

On the contrary, I think it gets far worse. Think about your entire music library. How much of it do you actively listen to? How much of it do you still care about? Or is it left over from those 6 months when you just can't get enough hiphop, and now you can't stand it anymore?

Tracking recent purchases will make for strong recommendations, since that's a good measure of where your tastes lie right now. Using your entire library (which is the only recommendation the Kindle can do) will inject a lot of noise, which is what happened to me (my entire library is on Cloud Player).

The whole thing desperately needs a Genius-like recommendation system. We know Amazon has the tech to do this, so why isn't there anything even remotely like it? Why is it that when I listen to music the UI is sparse and empty, and I'm not being upsold on relevant music?

Genius suffers from the same library-wide problem, but the difference is if you select a song, it will give you recommendations based solely on it. I've used this to discover new music a lot, and it works really well. Amazon desperately needs the same thing.

> "I think they're still working on recommendations, the app is still quite basic."

That really describes the entire device. You can see what they're getting at, but it's fallen so far short of the goal that it's sometimes infuriating how big the squandered opportunity is. Everything is "quite basic", and considering this is supposed to be the electronic gateway to all video, audio, periodical, and textual content... it does a really poor job everywhere of pushing content to you.

> On the contrary, I think it gets far worse. Think about your entire music library. How much of it do you actively listen to? How much of it do you still care about? Or is it left over from those 6 months when you just can't get enough hiphop, and now you can't stand it anymore?

Amazon right now doesn't know what I have or what I listen to. If they know what I have, it can't hurt things. They get listen data from your usage and can pick up further listen data from iTunes (the playcount data there is a great record of what I actually listen to).

Genius is great at finding similar stuff if I give it stuff I like, but the recommendations at the store are crap.

by emailing a document (again, try that on an iPad)

huh? You can read attachments normally on iOS, and mail them in. Since 5.0 (wi-fi sync) you can also just drag & drop the files onto the device in iTunes.

And save them where? You can keep a PDF in your email and try to read it, but that's a big stretch. On the Kindle it automatically gets put into Docs (which nets you stuff like remembering your position and not having to wade through thousands of emails to see your document again).

presses and holds

selects 'open in iBooks'

Seems to work here!

iBooks doesn't come installed on iOS devices, so that's not what happens when you use the device as it comes. (You just get the ability to Quick View it.)

Fair enough, though I'd suggest that iBooks' position as the Apple book reader will mean that most people who download apps will have it (though I know there's a sizable amount of users who never download anything).

Maybe not "as it comes" but even if you dont have iBooks, the "Open in.." menu will show any app that support the filetype. I can open pdf email attachments in iBooks, GoodReader, Dropbox or TabToolKit.

The first thing that happens (after the TOS) when you go to the App Store is it asks you if you want to download your free version of iBooks.

If you happen to be in a market that has iBooks.

I think it's a little strange to have to download an application called iBooks so that you can save documents (that you need to email yourself). Apple tries to be very intuitive, but document management on iOS is a mess. There is much room for improvement. I've had multiple people ask how to get documents on their iPad, which stands out because most everything else is so simple (especially after iOS 5 not needing as much of an iTunes lifeline).

On Kindle you go to Docs and it says "Nothing here, email something to XXX@kindle.com". You try that and boom it shows up. If you want to load some documents on your iOS device there's no obvious way without getting extra apps (which itself isn't obvious). iOS 4 addressed this somewhat to allow management through iTunes, but even after plugging it in it takes knowing to go to your device in iTunes, selecting Apps, scrolling down, clicking on an App under "File Sharing", clicking the "Add" button and choosing your file (then sync and hope it works, it doesn't let you know what file types are allowed so it's a crapshoot).

It's a side effect of iOS not having a shared repository of files. I'm surprised that iCloud didn't attempt to fix this, but it only keeps application specific documents in sync. Dropbox is still king, but because they're not integrated into the OS it feels like a hack. Maybe it's coming, but right now the iCloud folder on your Mac is hidden: http://www.macstories.net/tutorials/use-mobile-documents-fol...

Why does your ability to save an attachment depend on you having an application installed to open it with?

Because if you don't have an application to view it with outside email, what are you going to view it with outside email?

iOS is moving away from the user-facing file system. Normal users don't get it; they associate content with tools to process it with, not as content just sitting there wholly independent. If there isn't something to view the content with, the notion of storing content to not view is nonsensical.

I don't think people have difficulty with files; some fraction of people have difficulty with hierarchies of folders, but files? I don't think the evidence is there.

Tap on a PDF and it will ask you if you want to open it in Dropbox, iBooks, or any other PDF reader you have on your device. I keep mine organized in the iBooks categories, myself, but other people use different apps.

If you have any installed that is, none are installed when you buy your device.

"It's two days old, there isn't a lot of software written for it yet. That's not surprising since most developers just got theirs two days ago."

So it's unacceptable that the iPad doesn't come preinstalled with all the things that you expect but it's fine that the Fire can be currently gimped by a lack of third party apps?

The point is that the stuff you were complaining about is available and out there for iOS. Whether it's pre-installed or third-party is pretty irrelevant.

Isn't iBooks part of the default for iPads now?

iBooks wasn't around for the iPad 1, but things change.

> The size and weight are great, the iPad feels bulky after using the Fire.

Really? I only held one for a few minutes, but I thought it felt way too heavy (dense). It's only 2/3 the weight of the iPad 2, but since it's all plastic, I expected it to feel on the light side (like most Android phones, e.g. Galaxy S II).

As for bulkiness, I think both the iPad's and Fire's form factors are pretty great, and should be able to coexist rather than compete directly. For fullscreen video (which is 90% of what I use my iPad 2 for), the iPad form factor wins on sheer screen size, although the Fire's aspect ratio does fit most video better.

Also, Silk is by far the best mobile browser I've used, in terms of speed. It feels as fast, if not faster, than my laptop. Amazon really did what they said they did with Silk.

>Complaining about free streaming content

At what point did the term "free" come to describe things that you pay for? Whether you pay for Prime out of pocket or get it with your Fire, it is most certainly not free. Streaming is a part of Prime, and that doesn't make it free, either.

Do you believe that the HVAC in your car was free simply because it was bundled with the rest of your car?

Have you tried watching videos from other websites? How about using it to read HN or blogs?

I tried going in store and testing web browsing and video playback, but for some reason the display has its browser locked.

I have read HN, worked about as expected. The arrows are hard to touch accurately, but I have the same complaint with any mobile device (it's HN's fault--doubly so that votes can be changed).

I just went to nytimes.com and played some video on their homepage. Worked as expected. It's tricky to do direct comparisons because many sites show different versions for the iPad (the Fire seems to get a fair amount of general "mobile" sites, but is obviously too new for dedicated "Fire" sites). ESPN falls in this category, it works better on the iPad but is also specially made for it.