Tablets in all shapes, sizes and price ranges will greet shoppers this holiday season. The iPad currently reigns supreme, but can a more moderately priced, smaller device like the Kindle Fire win over gift-buying consumers?

Absolutely, says consumer electronics review site Retrevo.

The company polled 1,000 people in October on their tablet-buying intentions and found that, of those planning to buy a tablet, 44 percent would consider purchasing the $199 Kindle Fire instead of the iPad 2, which starts at $499. Then again, the same percentage of folks said that they didn’t know enough about the Fire, and 12 percent indicated that they would only buy an iPad.

I'm an original version 1 Kindle early adopter and I have loved it from day one! Even with it's flaws, which are aplenty…

I said when I bought it that it was a game changer. For me and Amazon.

I paid about $350 for it and it came with whispernet; which has worked flawlessly for me since day one. I love this because I can sit on Siesta Key beach reviewing books I'm interested in and downloading samples to check out. Then I can purchase and download the book I want right there; read it for a while and then go jump in the Gulf and cool down.

Aside from being able to buy books on the go and of course carry them all around with me in a small package, there is another less know feature of Kindle that I use regularly and has actually saved me a ton of money.

You see, I'm always doing research online and downloading a ton of content, usually pdfs that I would print out to read later; funny thing is I do not like to sit and read articles or books online. I read what I have to but I much prefer to take information away from the computer in printed form to read. I think a lot of people do.

And I was spending a ton of money on printer toner to do this.

Well along came Kindle and a neat software program called MobiPocket Creator; it can take a pdf or other types of document and package them up to go right on the Kindle and boy how I have used that over the years. Its probably saved me hundreds of dollars in toner!

As for the Kindle Fire; I looked at it and wondered; waited for reviews and opinions to surface. Kindle Fire has got a 4 star rating on Amazon at this time and a lot of mixed reviews. Having been an early adopter of Kindle 1, which was a technological marvel but a pain in the arse to hold , I think I'm going to wait until Amazon upgrade the software and features.

Some good things to note about Kindle Fire from my perspective;

• It's running Android – I've already gone Android, don't fight it…
• Amazon are a fantastic company – what they have done in the cloud is far superior to anyone and boggles the mind; really!
• Plugs into Amazon content
• Its not an iPad

Unfortunately the Kindle Fire does not appear to have all the features of a Kindle; probably because it's not actually a new Kindle. So you can't really buy it as a Kindle upgrade. It's a tablet.

Do I need a tablet?

To be honest I don't know what all the fuss is about tablets and particularly the iPad. I've got a Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet, which is a real computer and it's tiny, so I'll stick with that thank you very much and upgrade to a touch screen version sometime in the future.

I don't care for Apple too much; I own an iPod Touch which I like but the iTunes software sucks so bad I would gladly switch if there was a better hardware option available. It amazes me that Apple can produce such fantastic hardware and hobble it with such a crappy piece of software.

Yes I’m having to upgrade some hardware as I get more business and need more resources.

I recently upgraded the RAM on the development server. I installed 2 * 512MB kbyte memory modules. They were pretty cheap and I got them from Best Buy! That put the dev box up to 1.5GB RAM, I also installed a new hard drive, which I got at Best Buy too. A Seagate ATA100 120GB drive for $50! Bargain!

The original config for the dev box was a single hard drive that I needed to re-partition. I was looking all over the web for a partitioner for a Windows 2003 server and they were very pricey, $300 – $500 and up. Anyway, a friend of mine pointed me to a shareware product that worked like a charm! It’s called Gnome Partition Editor and you can download it free!

A customer of mine was backing up their server data onto a ZIP 750MB. The disk started to fill up. They had outgrown the simple zip solution and needed more space to backup.

I priced an Iomega REV solution, which with 5 disks would have cost about $600. WOW! That didn’t seem like a very good option for my client. So I thought about it a decided we could get away with a removable external USB hard drive to backup on. The cost, about $100.

The only problem with this scenario is that the disk external hard drive would not be taken off site each evening. If the office burned down, all the data would go with it. Not a good scenario.

Then the clients accountant said to me ‘why don’t you buy 2 usb external drives and swap them every night? That’s what we do…’.

So we got 2 usb external hard drives, which are 40GB, do not need an external power supply and can be plugnplayed on just about any computer with a USB port. Total cost $200.

I wish I’d thought of that before I went and bought another REV drive! Ah well.

I backup all my data every night onto an Iomega REV drive. I bought my 1st REV drive just over a year or so ago. The 1st one burnt out within a month and it was replaced by Iomega.

I used the drive every day and it worked well, though sometimes the disk would stick in the drive and I’d have to use a paper clip to remove the disk. There is a tiny hole in the front of the drive and you push the paper clip in the hole and out pops the disk. Seems like Iomega new this would be needed.

About 2 months ago, the disk jammed as I pushed it in and, without going into the details, completely buggered the drive. Now the good news. It was out of warranty! So, I bought a new drive, plus an extended 3 year warranty for about 60 bucks! Total cost to me about $450.

So, whats the point of this story? Let me explain…