Kindle Fire HD,


Kindle Fire HD – Amazon, have you forgotten something?

It just happened that I bought a 7” Kindle Fire HD last week, and Frankly, I loved it; having my Kindle Books, Audible books, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon music and Amazon Prime videos all accessible from a single device and stored in the cloud makes a geek like me the happiest man on earth, and its HD display and processing speed also give iPad 3 a run for its money, unfortunately though, that’s where the honeymoon ends.  Despite all the hype about its improved Hi-Fi speakers, trust me, you are still better off with a BOSE headphone, but then, for $199.00, I don’t really expect the mini-tablet to produce sounds that matches my $150 earphone, that’s not why I am having a lovers’ quarrel with it, my problem with my very dear, very beloved, very shiny new toy is quite literally, it won’t talk to me, and as everybody knows, communication is very important in a relationship!

Even though the quality of the voice engine is still arguably, less desirable than IVONA, Kindle Fire HD nonetheless does have text to speech capability enabled for the Kindle Books (thank heavens), but not for the Newspapers, so unlike Kindle Keyboard, it won’t read the News to the Blinds, it also does not come with voice commands, voice navigation or anything that can conceivably be useful to a blind person. To date, I have test-driven Apple iPad 3 and Google Tablet, both have made considerable efforts to make their device accessible to blind and legally blind section of the population, but it seemed to me like  Amazon quite deliberately exclude any accessibility options developed by either itself or Google; Which is totally mindboggling, because any geeks know that Kindle Fire/HD ran on Tweaked version of Android, which had a better voice engine AND accessibility option included since Android Honeycomb, so why did Amazon remove it? Is it cost? If Kindle Fire HD won’t talk to me, Amazon, can you?
  





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