Have had the 7" Fire HD (32GB) for a couple of days and it's a mixed bag. I also have an ipad (v1) and the Fire feels even more "locked-in" to Amazon than the ipad is to Apple. It's not really, but the Fire is anxious to give you the chance to go to Amazon and buy something.

I already have an Amazon account as I have 4 ereader Kindles and a few other things on the account - a Paperwhite and a DX for myself, a Kindle Keyboard for the spouse, my ipad and my son's ipad, my daughter-in-law's Kindle Keyboard, my phone). Downloading movies to the device is pretty simple and relatively quick, considering I have terribly slow internet service.

The Silk browser is fairly good, with some glaring omissions - while it is a tabbed browser, there is no way to create a bookmarks toolbar and there is no way to create bookmark folders. If you have, say, 50-60 sites you visit frequently, you get to scroll through the list. Very clunky. There is no ....... utility available (yet, that I can find). When you first open the browser, it comes up with three rows of websites - Frequently Visited, Trending and "Recommended" - haven't figured out how to get rid of the last two yet.

The speakers on the case are pretty good, certainly sort of "car radio-ish", fine for listening to most movies and the Spotify and Pandora apps work well to stream music.

Tablets are getting more expensive and laptops are getting cheaper, so I am not sure I am sold on the utility of tablets - some people manage to get real work done on them, but I am not one of them, they mostly fall into the "toy" category for me. $229 for a toy is expensive but doable, but the Apples, creeping up appallingly past the mid$400s and into the $500s well equipped, seem too expensive for toy status.