Saturday, June 18, 2016

Trying The Most Affordable Amazon Fire Tablet


Well I bought this Amazon Fire tablet which is on sale at Best Buy this week (June 12 to 18, and also at Amazon.com) for $39.99 because my Windows 10 laptop could no longer connect to the wi-fi at work. Sure I could still connect with my Android phone, 2012 Nexus 7 tablet,  and 4 year old Asus Transformer, but the phone is too small to type with and the tablets aren't too responsive anymore or at all. For the price, what have I got to lose, right?
I've been using the Fire for a couple of days now and despite it having only 1 gigabyte of RAM and 8 GB of storage, the responsiveness is pretty amazing. Sure it lags sometimes when a lot of apps are open but that's easily taken cared of by closing some. The home page is cluttered with Amazon apps that I mostly won't ever use but they cannot be uninstalled. A little research on the web showed how you can just put what you don't need in a folder thus decreasing the clutter. You can also supposedly only download apps from Amazon but not from Google Play. Well back to the web we go and sure enough you can download the apk file of any Android app and install it by changing the settings to allow non-Amazon apps. I've downloaded the Chrome browser and Dropbox apps and they've been working well so far other than I have not been able to sync my Chrome bookmarks. Now my desktop looks more like a regular Android tablet. Of course with just 8 GB of storage, it limits how much I can download until I can add a micro SD card. I added an SD card later and it's ok for storing files and photos but if you move some apps there, they tend to lag more because Amazon recommends a Class 10 SD card whereas the one I got from Ebay last year is just a much slower Class 2. Typing with either 2 thumbs or one index finger is pretty slow and limiting if you are used to touch typing, but tolerable. That's why I prefer tablets with physical keyboards. This post is the first time I tried typing on it.
Nevertheless, for the price of $39.99, you can't beat it, specially if your main use is just for surfing the web, social networking, or reading ebooks. The battery life is quite good too and with the way the way I surf the web and use Facebook, the battery still had 43% of juice after about 8 hours.  Well, that's my nonprofessional review of the Amazon Fire tablet after just 2 days of use and so far I like it.

No comments:

Statcounter