Kindle Fire 7
In Amazon’s words The New Kindle Fire 7″ is a “Powerful Tablet at an Incredible Price.”
Incredible price, absolutely! Powerful tablet, that’s a bit of a stretch. I mean define powerful, to a mouse a cat is powerful, to humans a whale is powerful. Just so you know I own one of the new 7″ Kindle Fire’s and previously owned a iPad mini 2. The bottom line is, these tablets are an amazing deal, in my opinion the best in their class for the following reasons, 1. They only cost $50! 2. They perform and are built as well as a $100 tablet. Lastly, you have the whole world of Amazon in front of you (for only $50, that’s half the price of Amazon prime for the whole year!).
Value:
Let’s start with the value you are getting here. For $50 you get a quad-core processor, 7 hours of battery life, 4.5gb of usable storage and a micro SD slot capable of a 128gb card, a 1024 x 600 IPS display with 171 ppi, not to mention it’s very durable. The processor has held up well for me, although there has been a couple times when I need to restart an app because it freezes or crashes. This problem could also have to do with the fact that it only has 1gb of ram. Although for $50 the processor has performed well. The battery is pretty good especially because Amazon says it will last 7 hours and it does approximately that.
I did a test, my kindle was at 100% when I started a 90 min bicycling video with the sound at around 60%, when the video ended the battery hung around 80% so at that pace you’d be getting around 7 1/2 hours of battery life, not bad at all. 4.5gb of usable space is not much, but the micro SD card slot helps a lot with that problem. I would have paid an extra $10-$15 for 16gb of internal storage. Keep in mind that none of your space should be taken up by photos due to the horrible 2MP camera, although you shouldn’t be buying a kindle to take pictures anyway.
The display is not terrible, text and images appear slightly blocky but the display should not deter you from purchasing this tablet, it didn’t deter me. This is a very durable tablet amazon claims it to be twice as durable as the iPad mini 4. Which is probably true, but lets be serious here, aesthetically the iPad wins by far, not to mention the iPad is much thinner. Something to consider is the fact that this tablet does not support 802.11 ac Wi-Fi, only Single-band Wi-Fi b/g/n.
But all in all as Engadget said “For $50, it’s simply the best value tablet you can buy right now.”
This tablet runs Amazon’s newest OS, Fire OS 5 codenamed “Bellini.” This gives you all the apps, movies, books, and music from Amazon. Which is great if you have already invested in entertainment through Amazon! Sadly, you cannot get Google play apps, unless you run through a few hoops then take those hoops and twirl them around you a few times.
Steps to get Google Play apps:
What you need to do first is go to settings on your device. Then press device options. Scroll to the bottom and press serial number about 7-10 times. By now you should have developer options, press it and make sure the toggle is on where it says Enable ADB. On your computer download the Amazon-Fire-5th-Gen-Install-Play-Store.zip file and extract it where you like, but remember where. Now plug in your kindle to your computer.
Then open the extracted file and double click the 1-Install-Play-Store batch file. Once it loads follow the steps to install device drivers (you may need to make sure your device is connected as a camera instead of a media device and update the drivers under “other devices” rather than “MTP devices”). After you have installed the drivers, follow the steps to test them by going to install drivers in the batch file and testing them to see if the serial number pops up. Now you should be able to follow the steps to install the play store.
I hope you were able to install it (it took me about and hour to figure this all out, so don’t worry if it doesn’t work the first time). Once the play store is installed you will have to open it and sign in with your account. You may have noticed the ads also came off the front screen on your device, if so awesome, I am so happy for you! Unfortunately they went away for me for a couple of minutes then returned. I will try again to get rid of them and will update this blog post if I succeed, until then I am stuck with ads on the lock screen. Please let me know if you have found a solution.
Before I conclude I’d like to mention two more things, first, the special offer means on your lock screen you will have ads (unless you are able to get rid of them with the batch file), b.t.w. you need the special offer to retain a $50 price. Second, you also get one month free of Amazon Prime.
In Conclusion:
The Kindle Fire 7” 5th Gen is an amazing value and I definitely recommend it. Don’t forget to sign up to my newsletter! I hope you enjoyed my review and it helped you to make a decision on whether this $50 Amazon tablet is right for you.
Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.