Amazon has been running some great deals on their hardware devices. I was able to get the Amazon Fire HD 8 Tablet for around $44, about half the regular price. The 7th generation Fire tablet was released in June 2017 and comes with Alexa. It has an 8″ screen with a resolution of 1280×800 and 16 or 32 GB of internal storage and a microSD slot for up to 256 GB of expandable storage.
For the price range, I don’t think you will be able to find a better tablet. Also if you are a heavy Amazon user you will enjoy the integration with Amazon Music, Books, Audible, Videos, and Photos. Fire OS is an Android-based operating system that comes on the Fire Tablets. It works well but you are limited to the amount of customization you can do with the tablet. The first thing I noticed is the lack of the Google Play Store that normally comes on an Android device. You can install most apps from the Amazon Appstore, but not all such as YouTube. Luckily you can install the Google Play store manually without rooting your device. So far I haven’t had any issues installing apps. Also if you purchase your tablet with “special offers“, which pretty much means ads on your lock screen, you can have them removed for $15 or contact amazon custom support and just ask for them to be removed. I was able to get them removed for free.
So now that we’ve covered some of the pros of the Fire tablet, let’s go over some of the cons. Comparing the screen quality/brightness, the speakers and the camera to an iPad mini 2 that I purchased back in 2014, isn’t even close. The 3-year-old iPad beats the Fire tablet in most areas granted it cost about six times the price.
Overall I think the Fire tablets will work great for kids or if you are a big user of Amazon products. Just don’t expect to get a tablet similar to the iPad. Let me know if you own a Fire tablet and what you think. Also, check out some of the Fire accessories.
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