Amazon Kindle Fire
The Kindle Fire is one of the lowest priced tablets currently on the market, but when you’re going up against the iPad and the various Android tablets; you need a lot more than a low price to satisfy consumers. Amazon offers this with several feature and services that give users a fairly good experience with the Fire.
Using the Kindle is very similar to using any other tablet on the market. The screen is sharp and responsive with its only downside being that at 7 inches, it is much smaller than the competition. This will slightly hinder your experience if you need the Fire for movies and TV shows, but it gets the job done for the occasional viewing.
With the Amazon store, the selection for apps is nowhere near the size of Apple or Android’s. It does however provide you with most of the popular, commonly used apps such as Facebook, Pandora, etc. However, with the Amazon store, you also get access to their large selection of e-books, music, and movies (the last two are almost as large as what iTunes offers). If you opt to get an Amazon Prime membership at only $79 a year, you’ll have access to free streaming movies and TV shows. If you don’t watch enough to warrant the membership fee, you can still buy and rent content a very reasonable price.
Now for some of the shortcomings of the Fire. First, which may be a deal breaker to some, is its miniscule memory. At only 8GB, you can’t store much on your tablet before it fills up. Amazon tries to solve this with their Cloud service that offers 5GB of free storage, with users having to pay for any additional storage capacity. This is great if you’re always connected to WiFi, but unfortunately this isn’t the case. This brings us to my next point which is that there is no 3G option for the Kindle. This is a major drawback if you’re frequently on the move and need access to internet all the time. Lastly, the Fire lacks a camera so you won’t be able to use it for video chat or even the occasional picture.
For its $199 price tag, the Kindle has a lot to offer. It will be more than enough if you want to use it mainly for e-books, web browsing, and the occasional app. It’s great if you have a strict budget, but still want to jump on the tablet bandwagon. However if you don’t think you’ll be able to deal with the Fire’s small memory and smaller screen then you may be better off spending the extra money for a higher end Tablet.