My intention as the school year began was to get a touchscreen laptop for each kid. But as I began looking at the lower end ones that would fit for children, I realized that our 24 inch iMac is actually much better for most of the webapps they use, and their iPad and Kindle Fire tablets are good for everything else. Since we have an extra 24 inch monitor laying around as well as an additional blue tooth keyboard, I wondered why I couldn’t just set up a 2nd workstation for my son using his Kindle Fire, with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
So I ordered the HDMI adapter from Amazon, as well as a cable for it to connect to the monitor. Seems like a pain to me that you have to order both instead of just 1 super adapater thingy, but I did what the Amazon forums told me I had to do. When the Kindle Fire 7 HD 4th Generation first arrived as a gift from a relative, I thought the thing seemed a bit like a toy. The OS seemed chopped off at the kneees, and I wondered what the thing would be good for other than watching some videos and doing a couple of game style apps. But it turns out the thing is quite snappy - it surfs the web darn fast, and has most of the apps I wanted him to have, as well as running any webapp that doesn’t rely on Flash. Poor Flash, all those years of service only to be stamped out! Our cable should be here soon, and I’ll have to update whether you can really set up a basic workstation with your Kindle. Printing is a bit weird, via some HP app, but I’m hopeful that the learning apps will perform great.
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