On Friday my Kindle Fire HD was unceremoniously shoved through my letter box.
The box
Its attractive packaging and seemed to cushion the device’s fall onto the tiled floor in my porch.
You open the box by pulling the perforated cardboard tab.
Kindle Fire HD packaging open
The Kindle Fire HD comes with an USB cord and an instruction leaflet. It switches on on the short side. The button is recessed and not easy to see, so you won’t keep turning it on by mistake.
It’s already pre-registered to your Amazon account.
Kindle Fire HD home screen
Notice it says Jill’s 2nd Kindle at the top of the screen. Items you’ve looked at appear in the carousel. I gather this is a modified Android OS – it’s certainly similar to my Sony S tablet. There’s a free app of the day at the moment. Jamie Oliver today.
Very gratifyingly, the Adobe DPS folio I experimented with in the summer loaded on to this straight away once I loaded the Adobe content viewer app.
Adobe DPS folio
The screen is lovely. These photos don’t do it justice at all. New users get, I think, 5 gig of cloud storage (and a months free Amazon Prime, incidently). This is the gallery screen for the cloud storage. You can download to the device to view offline or you can sideload photos from your desktop.
Kindle Fire HD Photos screen
Books look good. There is now a night and sepia theme (like iBooks) and a text-to-speech facility. It’s a female, American voice, though, and I haven’t found a way to change it.
Kindle Fire HD text to speech facility
Just need to get it a cover now, so I can chuck it in my bag of gadgets.
Three Wishes Books 
My partner and I absolutely love your blog and find almost all of your post’s to be precisely what I’m looking for.
Does one offer guest writers to write content for yourself?
I wouldn’t mind writing a post or elaborating on many of the subjects you write regarding here. Again, awesome site!
Thanks for your kind comments. As you probably see I am fairly erratic with my posts – and often there is quite a gap between them. I tend to write about printing and publishing issues when they come up in my work and when I find an interesting book to write about.