Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

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35 pointsbsilvereagle71 comments

Everything Amazon does with the Fire product line I find to be terrible. The Kindle Paperwhite is a delight to use but the Fire is beyond frustrating and, often as not, feels like a device designed for the sole purpose of parting me with my money on Amazon other products.

My 7 year old got a Kids Kindle Fire. I have 20+ years software engineering experience yet I have more trouble trying to do the most basic things with that device. Its infuriating.

We got the Fire TV Stick figuring it would be a good alternative to the Roku. Its not. Most of the time it couldn't keep a connection to wifi.

I don't know what Amazon is thinking but, in my opinion, their reputation is suffering badly because of their handling of the Fire product line. I know personally I will never buy another Fire product.

The Fire TV stick is the best $ I've spent on a TV device. I love it - fast, responsive, does not drop connections, and has all the apps I want.

I've used Boxee, Google TV, Roku, Chromecast, and (XMBC on Raspberry Pi) and none of those compare to the FireTV stick. It blows them out of the water.

Boxee was my favorite until the team building it deserted it

One nice thing about the Roku is that it searches across multiple apps for content. The Amazon TV devices put Amazon content front and center, making you think you have to buy a video when you already have access to it via Netflix without having to pay more.

I've got a kids kindle fire with their free time service for my 6 year old and couldn't agree more. The software and ui are terrible. Worse in some cases than their older fire devices. My son was trying to install a couple of apps yesterday and the progress bar got to 100% and then stalled. The little X on the icons to cancel the process didn't work and a reboot didn't help. The apps weren't in the list of installed apps or anywhere else. I ended up having to block them from his profile and then unblock them before they would reset in the UI. Then we downloaded them one at a time which seemed to work. I spent a good 20 minutes trying to find a way to do this. This is just one small example of the frustrations we've had with the device and all of them stem from the poor user experience and confusing choices they've made.

I'm also not impressed with the fire sticks. I don't own any myself but a friend bought four on a whim. He's called me at least a dozen times asking for help with figuring out why they've mysteriously stopped working. It's usually just that the wifi has dropped which happens all the time. Other times it's because his DSL from AT&T is terrible and has reset while he was streaming something and then the device is apparently locked out of any Amazon content most likely due to copyright protection restrictions but the error is just "Video player error this content is currently unavailable." If he swaps devices he can pick up where he left off but that one device is locked out of everything from Amazon for an unknown amount of time while other apps work perfectly.

I like AWS but most of their hardware and other software is terrible.

Before people buy stuff like this and expect to be able to install Cyanogen in a few months:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/fire-hd/general/psa-dont-buy...

You can find Chinese tablets for a similar price with better specs and cleaner/closer to stock android rom with Google services. If your plan is to get this in order to try and flash cyanogen or something similar then you won't mind the dodgy Chinese warranty.

Maybe I'm not sufficiently hardware-savvy, but what's the downside here?

I am more or less in the market for a modest tablet, but I'm indifferent to whether it comes from Amazon. Can someone recommend a better deal?

Likely it's heavily subsidized vs market value in order to increase initial buy with the hope you will purchase from the marketplace.

If you want an ereader get a paperwhite imo. But if you actually want a screen tablet this may not be a bad bet. There are lots of good cheap android devices these days too. Fire does run android but in my dev shop we treat fire with special care due to both the heavy modification and different store.

It's not a pure android device so you're going to be very much locked in to the amazon market.

The new FireOS seems to be much closer to stock Android

Biggest downside is the FireOS, Amazon store instead of Google Play, etc.

If you want to do basic web surfing stuff, this is a phenomenal deal. I doubt you'll find a better one.

If you want to experience all that modern Android tablets are capable of, these tablets will not provide that. In particular anything related to Google services (mail/apps) and Android apps that are delivered through the Google Play store but not delivered though the Amazon store. There are a lot of mainstream apps that don't bother to push their apps to Amazon's store.

Excuse my ignorance, what prevents a savvy user from flashing it with a different OS?

locked bootloaders.

got a Xoom 2ME here. decent hardware, but I never got a new OS on it

almost no Android phone allows custom os! understands this.

all Samsung phones can only be flashed because someone leaked a internal tool. and still, there must be a huge community effort to get the kernel and drives for each model.

now keep in mind that this huge community effort doesn't exist even for for-developers v phones, such was the case with the moto x dev edition. with phones like fire, it's practically non existent!

Android devices are not open by any means. they just have a lovely stubborn community.

I savy user probably values their time more than its worth. Spend a little more and you don't have to.

As @deng mentioned above, the Amazon tablets have historically had locked bootloaders -- they won't load custom ROMs. The XDA guys seem to believe it's unlikely you'll ever be able to load Cyanogen on one of them.

> The XDA guys seem to believe it's unlikely you'll ever be able to load Cyanogen on one of them.

The first-generation Fire tablets definitely support Cyanogenmod, though it was a bit awkward to get around the bootloader lock at first. Are the newer ones not supported?

From what I could tell, (at least) the $50 Fire is currently ad supported, and by default Amazon Underground is ad supported as well.

Ouch. This one landed. If this is true, then I think it would turn me off the deal. Unless I wanted to try what someone else mentioned and flash it with CyanogenMod or something. Never done that before, but this might be a good way to start..

edit: It looks like they've got the same situation vis-a-vis ads as all Kindles - yes they have ads, there is some attempt to make them unobtrusive, and they only have ads in the US.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/all-kindle-fire-hd-models-ad-su...

So that explains that. Now to find out how hard flashing a new OS would be. :)

Just ads on lockscreen...not too bad.

Ads on the lockscreen may be fine from a UX perspective, however, that tablet is now using data when it's a sleep which becomes a factor when someone is on a capped connection. Sure, it may only be a handful of MB/month, but to some people, every MB counts.

I believe this thing only has wifi, so that's not a relevant problem.

This might come as news, but wifi data is still data and counts towards the data cap.

Its not some free magical data flying around on its own.

In what third-world country do you have to live for your home DSL (or fiber or whatever) to have a data cap? Even back in the olden days of dial-up that would be laughable on the face of it.

Can you turn off the lockscreen?

Don't think 'lock' think 'swipe over to make sure this isn't a pocket dial' screen.

They (Kindle Paperwhite or Fire) only show ads if you are physically in the US? Or if you buy one from Amazon's US site? (Genuinely curious here.)

If you've never done rooting/flashing before, an Amazon device is not a good place to start. I did it on a HDX 7 only after a ton of reading, and the consensus is that it's easy to get it wrong and brick the device. There are no escape hatches like there are on the Google Nexus devices. I've done this a ton on my Nexus 5 and my HD2 several years prior.

Also note that the HD 6 and HD 7 are still not flashable, and they've been out for some time. Amazon seems to have gone out of their way to make this a difficult device to tinker on.

My recommendation is to find a well-treated used Nexus 7 and you will have a much better time of things. They are much easier to flash with better ROM support. Please don't buy this thing with the expectation of enjoying some weekend tinkering - it's not worth your time.

(I suppose I'll caveat that the one scenario where it would make sense to get it now would be that v1 firmwares contain bugs that will make your life easier when exploits are found, but still - probably not worth it)

You can pay an additional $15 and get the version that's not ad supported. When you click configure and add to cart you are presented with that as the first option.

What does this mean for Amazon's Fire HD 6" Tablet[0]? Looking it now, the new Fire tablet is about the same in every way (screen resolution lacking), but at $50 more, I'm not sure the better screen resolution will win many people over.

The new Fire Tablet even has features the 6" one is missing! Mayday and an SD card slot.

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KC6I06S/

Wonder if you could root this and install Cyanogen or something?

i guess if it's a standard chipset and unlocked bootloader, give it a couple of months. You can get a decent tablet for not very much more though

Amazon quietly does pretty good business with some school districts. We've made several 1,000+ unit bulk sales of educational apps through them. It's not iPad numbers, but it's a lot better than we thought.

This device will slip perfectly into that role.

Interesting. Very tempting as-is, but we'll have to see where we're at with Cyanogen Mod support in a few months before I'll buy one. Though I realize I'm not the target demographic for this by any means.

I'm unsure about the hardware capabilities of this. I understand that the display cannot display 1080p.

However, if i do copy a 1080p mp4 file with subtitles onto it, is it likely that this one will be able to play it?

With all the things on the market, why is Amazon doing this? 50 bucks? I am really trying to understand why..

looks great, if it supports touch-pen it will be perfect for school kids.

Indeed. You'd feel a lot better about turning a little kid loose with a $50 Fire tablet than a $500 iPad.

I like how it puts ads on the lock screen to offset costs

Does anyone knows if this comes with a Snapdragon CPU?

most likely mediatek or maybe even allwinner

mediatek: http://bgr.com/2015/09/16/amazon-tablet-specs-50-dollars/

Amazon! Won't ship to lonely old Canada.

Can anyone else confirm? Seems to have added to my basket (on Amazon.com, but with Canadian account). Now, with a $.70CAD->USD conversion...

It would be more interesting if Amazon put Flash on it instead of making it a spam delivery device. Swim upstream.

Less work than Amazon Underground, more free games.

You're kidding, right?

Flash is dying tech, and not worth the battery life tradeoff (which this device doesn't have much of to begin with)

AFAIK Adobe stopped supporting flash on Android some time ago. It would be a considerable engineering effort to get it working again. Plus, (again, AFAIK) flash it not common among touch devices and I would be surprised if all games would work easily without a mouse.

That aside, what if Amazon got it working? What then? Free content doesn't help Amazon any.

The Fire tablets are not just about games/apps - it's about tying the user into the rest of Amazon's media ecosystem. Video, books and shopping. It's Amazon's equivalent of free parking.

If free content doesn't help, why spend time on Amazon Underground? My point is: do something different. A low-rent imitation of everything else has so far cost them a fortune. The original Fire had a Flash plugin. I'm sure they could get it working for the cost of about 12 minutes of Prime losses.

To clarify - free content not on Amazon doesn't help Amazon any. Getting more people on Amazon Underground is absolutely helpful. It increases customer mindshare of Amazon apps, increases lock-in and increases the cost of moving over to the Play Store with a different device. This translates into more usage of the Fire devices, which funnels users into shopping more on Amazon.com.

Getting flash working (and working well) would be great for customers. Just not for Amazon.

Mono speaker? I guess they expect everyone to use headphones.

No, they expect anyone who cares to pay more than $50.

If your saying its "built for entertainment", a mono speaker doesn't go with that.

You're not going to get any sort of audio fidelity from the speakers in a tablet, so anyone who wants that is already using headphones. Thus it's likely that the people using that speakers can't hear the difference between mono/stereo for the content they care about.

Exactly. Even on the higher-end iPads the built-in speakers are pretty much crap for any kind of serious listening.

Not to mention that the stereo separation you're going to get on a 7" tablet is going to be minimal anyway.

There's a difference between "serious listening" and having left and right channels in a tablet. A person can tell left and right on a 7" device held as close as a tablet. Audio clues matter.

Never going to buy a 7" no matter how cheap it gets. The screen resolution is not worth it.

Don't just down-vote dammit, give me an argument if you care so much to click.

The people are being hoodwinked into buying these so-called "tablets" of smaller sizes, where as, none of these should be called tablets, rather, they are just a bigger size phones with no traditional calling features. Amazon or no Amazon, you would be wasting your time, energy and $$ if you buy a tablet with anything less than 1024x768 resolution. Just don't.

My Nexus 7 from 3 years ago has better specs and cost only slightly more. Who buys this junk?

Parents. It comes with a two-year "no questions asked" warranty and free access to tons of media curated by an independent third party.

Actually, the "no questions asked" warranty is only on the "Kids edition" which is $100. The Kids edition is the $50 tablet + a case + "FreeTime", and the 2 year replacement warranty.

I don't want my kids bombarded with ads for crap on Amazon.

Then you can pay an extra $15 and get one that doesn't bombard your kids with ads for crap on Amazon.

Where do I find more info about that? I tried returning it and they said I was past the 90-day return policy.

Your Nexus 7 did not cost 50 bucks three years ago.

(Also it's hardly junk because you don't like the price)

People who are not technically literate and bought into the Amazon eco system.

Also Hearthstone players where, with the right combination of events, you can buy in-game currency at a discount that likely exceeds the $50 [if you buy $500 worth of in game currency, which is not unusual in a TCG, you only need a 10% discount to effectively get a "free" tablet]

http://hearthstoneplayers.com/today-only-special-bonus-on-am... [40% discount, spend $200 and end up with a free tablet]

Re Hearthstone: This is something that applies to any user of the Amazon store, which is open to regular android users. I doubt Amazon's target demographic for this tablet is "Hearthstone players"... at least, not for that reason.

Yeah but I can't think of anything on Amazon worth $200 of Amazon coins besides that.

My customers use cheap Fire tablets as e-signature collection devices.

Which software do they use to collect the signatures? Is it in the app store? With the Amazon Android?

Part of my product is a browser based e-signature collection tool using <canvas>, React.js and web sockets. So, not Android related. Any capacitive touch device with a browser and internet works.

It's fairly domain specific today (credit card transactions and legal agreements), but as a weekend project I want to abstract it for broader use cases.

The Nexus 7 was 3 times as much. Maybe $100 isn't much to you, but it is to a lot of people.

Your Nexus 7 cost (more than) 4x as much when it was introduced, no comparison.

Further, there's probably a market for people who want simple devices laying around at their bedside, couch or table that's bigger than their phone, more functional than an e-reader but not as clunky as a laptop (still very much a form factor for desks) for doing light digital stuff like reading the news, e-reader, checking email, browsing the web, watching video etc. None of this really requires high-end specs. This is exactly what I bought the Nexus 7 for (intro'd at $200 for the 7 and $230 for the 7 2nd gen), for my girlfriend, and she hasn't run a single app yet in the last 2 years that'd have required more specs than this tablet. The only thing she might miss is the N7's beautiful screen compared to the 170 PPI Fire tablet, but after buying a MBA a few weeks ago she still hasn't noticed the 128 PPI yet despite me pointing it out to here a few times and she's super happy so even here I think the Fire tablet would've more than sufficed for her use.

Granted with 5 inch phones becoming the norm the 7 inch form factor is being squeezed a bit, but at $50 it's still a very interesting little consumption device to have laying around.

It's not for me but I've got several family members for whom it's pretty good value.

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