What to buy on Amazon : Kindle Reader

Good news for book lovers. Amazon is currently running 2 offers for the Kinder.

• Purchase the Kindle Paperwhite, 6" High-Resolution Display (212 ppi) with Built-in Light, Wi-Fi - Includes Special Offers or Kindle Voyage, 6" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Adaptive Built-in Light, PagePress Sensors, Wi-Fi - Includes Special Offers and save $40 on Amazon Prime subscription
• Purchase the Kindle, 6" Glare-Free Touchscreen Display, Wi-Fi - Includes Special Offers and save $39 on 6 months of Kindle Unlimited subscription

However, do note that Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited are primarily US only services. This is not a bad deal actually, especially if you are already looking to buy one.

Update : It's even better today (27th Nov). Kindle is $49 while the Paperwhite is $99. And still comes with the above mentioned offers! Amazing!

Amazon Prime : Updates

A quick update to the previous Amazon Prime article I wrote. Since then a few things have happened. The first and foremost is of course the price is now $99/yr.

Amazon added Prime Photos where you have unlimited storage for your photos. This is stored on Amazon's Cloud Drive and you can access them from any of your devices, be it your phone, tablets or PCs.

The other new addition is Unlimited Music Streaming. It works the same way as Prime Instant Video and Premium Spotify. You have access to a huge library and is able to download tracks offline (although you can only do this on the Amazon Music App). If you know Prime Instant Video, Netflix and Spotify, yeah, that's how it works.

Lastly, Amazon also includes Prime Early Access to Lightning Deals. Now, this is a killer feature. For the first time, if you're a Prime Member, you can get a 30-minute early access advantage to selected lightning deals! This will usually decide if you actually get that popular deal or not, especially for the perennial popular items like external disk and SSDs.

Besides these, you still get the usual 2-day shipping with no minimum, Prime instant Video and Kindle Owners' Lending Library. This is starting to look even more attractive. If you're not too sure about forking out $99/yr yet, you can actually try it for free here - Join Amazon Prime - Listen to Over a Million Songs - Start Free Trial Now. Just remember to cancel it after your 30 days is up.

Or if you already have it and love it so much you might want to consider gifting it to your family members or a good friend - Shop Amazon - Give the Gift of Amazon Prime

Happy shopping and enjoy all the current Black Friday deals going on.

What to Buy on Amazon : HP Stream 7

Not too long ago, HP introduces this nifty little 7" tablet, HP Stream 7 32GB Windows 8.1 Tablet (Free Office 365 Personal for One Year), at an amazing price point : $99. Now you might wonder, there are a couple of Chinese made tablets that also can be had for $99 so what's the big deal here.

First, this tablet runs Windows 8.1. The full version, not the still-born RT in the Surface RT. Second, it has a decent and nice IPS touch screen running at 1280x800 resolution. Most importantly, it came bundled with Office 365 Personal 1yr Subscription. This subscription is valued at $69.99. That alone makes this bundle an excellent value proposition.

That aside, there are a few things you should take note and while the price tag is attractive, we need to keep things in perspective. It is unlikely to run graphics intensive games or do any kind of heavy lifting smoothly, you know, like Lightroom or Photoshop. I exaggerate but you get the idea. Most of these limitations come from the fact that it only has 1GB of memory and a quad core Atom based CPU. We know the Atom is not the fastest and you probably couldn't multi-task very well. However, it should serve you well with the occasional emails, small and straight forward Word and Excel documents, web surfing and Skype.

One other thing to consider is that it's a small 7" screen and without a physical keyboard, you might not find this a very productive tool. You might also have an issue with the small on-screen control elements where you might not be able to say select the menu items easily.

You are unlikely to be able to install a lot of programs due to the small on-board 32GB eMMC. You can, however, expand up till another 32GB via the onboard micro-SD card slot (hidden underneath the back shell). I've seen reports saying that the micro-USB charging port is USB-OTG compatible so there's a chance that you might be able to stick another thumb drive to it.

Read the reviews posted on the Amazon's website to get some more details. I might pick one up and play with it at the end of the day. :)