When we travel I drag along my old laptop running Linux.  I occasionally have trouble hooking up to wifi at hotels.  Not only that but it's old, heavy and doesn't run long on the battery making it necessary to plug it in most of the time.

I was thinking that the Amazon Fire HD 7 might be more than adequate for a what I want when traveling.  It has about 8 hours of battery.  It's big enough to read stuff.

I ASSUME you can use Google Maps on it?

I ASSUME you can set up your regular email account on it or you can use your gmail account?

Can you type on it easily for the purpose of emailing?

We have an original or close to it Kindle and it's got buttons that make navigation difficult and while it's a great reader it's not what I want for the Internet.

I was looking for a video of somebody using one of these but all I've found are video's showing the device and talking about it.

How easy is it to use and how do you use it?