Amazon reveals $50 Android-ish Fire tablet it will axe in two years Amazon has pumped out its latest attempt to stake a claim in the luggable electronics market with a $50 tablet. The retail giant said its new seven-inch Fire tablet will sport a 1.3Ghz quad-core processor – most likely ARM compatible – with 8GB of storage (and a microSD slot), a 1024 x 600 resolution touchscreen, and a seven- …
You must be new here. The $1==£1 pricing by US Companies in the UK has been going on to my knowledge for at least 40 years.
The US computer maker that I worked for had to change its pricng at one point because BT threatened to buy all its kit from us through its US subsidiary. Before that our pricing was close to 1:1
And as has been many times calculated on this forum once you take into account such things as UK price being inclusive of VAT, and US price excluding (for most states at least) things like sales tax the price difference is not quite as much a rip-off as it might seem at first glance.
"The all-new Fire features a quad-core processor, is incredibly durable"
Durable? Incredibly durable?? Excuse me if I'm just **extremely** skeptical of that claim from the salesrep. To achieve such a low cost, I doubt that you get anything but a strong plastic feel out of it.
As for the inside, you are on amazon's spin of Android. Will they provide FireOS updates for this device? Will that FireOS in itself be a durable thing and updated? Unknown!
Ok, I got it. It _is_ "incredibly durable", when referring to your enslavement to a single supplier of content.
Just as Apple was gearing up to roll out a new iPhone, Amazon quietly announced it would no longer produce its Fire Phone, the handset it first introduced in 2014 and later cut to a price of just 99 cents with a two-year contract.
There fixed it for you
If I'm looking for a tablet to read PDF-format magazines (IEEE digital library, for example), browse the web, read email, and maybe watch an occasional film, is one of the new larger Fire tablets, 8" or 10", an adequate choice? I have a Kindle for books, but like this £50 one it's too small to read magazines on. Amazon pricing seems fair for a run-of-the-mill tablet, presumably on the assumption that I'll buy their content, which I probably wont.
<uninformed-opinion>I have an older Kindle Fire that was used almost exclusively for reading. It's very good for that, but my Kindle is even better (for books that don't use color/colour).
If you expect your PDF's to include color (ah, t'hell wit'it) then I expect a larger Fire would be great; in fact I might think about doing that myself... except I don't read many PDF's. Or if you just need a larger format than the Kindles offer.
</uninformed-opinion>
at this price point, rooting is inevitable and I bet we will see some interesting ideas. Oh, and some ground-breaking (metaphorically) too. Combine it with a drone, for example, and what do you get? A 6-inch screen hovering in a halo of razor blade, for about 20 sec.
but some projects will be useful and replicable, looks like Amazon have finally contributed something to the progress of the human race.
I bought my kid the kid's tablet for last Christmas and it is dire. If it's possible to store downloaded video from amazon and the iplayer on the sd card I might take a punt on the £50 tablet. Otherwise I'll stick with my playbook (or just buy a Z30 and stick the micro sd card in it and it should allow me to do everything the tablet can and a lot more although it is just over three times the price).
or can it be made to use the Google Play store? I just want to use one out in my shop to do quick lookups, PDF viewing and act as a streaming music player. Bluetooth would be a plus, and Cyanogen - as mentioned by others - would be a deal maker for this thing. I don't have high expectations, so they should be easily exceeded, as it'll likely be replacing my arthritic Viewsonic gTab running VEGAn-TAB.
The "HD" versions are the lower spec models. The higher-spec models are "HDX" -- these come in LTE data/GPS-containing versions as well as WiFi only, and have nicer screens and other specs, including 2GB RAM. The 7" Fire HDX has a 1200x1920 display, quad-core 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 800, etc. The 8.9" Fire HDX has a 1600x2560 display, Snapdragon 805 at 2.5 GHz, etc.
If you go to a site like Gearbest.com you'll see lots of tablets for this kind of price. The unit will be basic, it won't have a super-large or super-high resolution screen but it will work.
Consider the alternative. The Los Angeles Unified School District wanted to give tablets to all of its students and being clueless went for a previous generation iPad. They were being caught $700+ per unit. You don't give that kind of unit to kids. $50 is more like it. (The LAUSD project fell apart before they could spend the entire $1Billion on the things. Fortunately.)
It really is worth shopping around, I picked up a 7" Acer with 32GB of storage, a 32BG microSD card and a case, all of that came to approx £60. Sure it won't set the world alight with its performance but for browsing the Internet, checking emails and listening to music it does just great and that 32GB SD stores a lot of music and as a pleasant surprise it isn't so far from stock Android when compared to Samsung, Sony, Amazon etc...
From personal experience, that Acer will stop recognising the "2" and "&" on the virtual keyboard about 2 days after the one year warranty expires. (hard resets and factory restores dont fix it).
The Acer is pretty solid though, I threw mine the length of the house - it bounce off of a wall and bounced down the stairs onto the tile floor; even with the screen smashed and the case in pieces, it still worked!!!! (although not the "2" or "&").
The Asus MemoPad is pretty tough, my daughter did manage to damage it - dropping it from a shopping trolley onto a brick carpark surface damaged the SD slot. Even then, it might have been OK if there wasnt a SD card in there, the impact caused the case to pop open slightly and the card was forced upwards, breaking the eject mech and snapping some of the slots contacts on the mother board. Other than that, it still works perfectly.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
