I have bought Amazon Fire – truly amazing. It costs only $50, while it should go for something like $200. My guess is that most people buying Fire will purchase content worth much more then $200 from Amazon and thus the company will not lose.
I bought one of these when they were on sale. $50? Ripoff.
Immediately rooted it, of course.
Not the most powerful tablet, not the highest screen resolution, but good enough.
So much lighter and easier to use than my old Nook HD+.
Note the pattern with subsidized tablets.
It has “Play”, but, it doesn’t say “Google Play”. Can one download from “**Google **Play” with one of those?
Can I play Simpson’s Tapped Out on it? 
I’ve had a Kindle Fire for more than three years, and I play Tapped Out on it just fine. It’s available in the Amazon app store.
It is a fairly easy process to install the normal Google Play store on a Kindle Fire (or an Amazon Fire) and change it into a normal Android tablet. Do the googling, it’s a matter of downloading a program to your PC, attaching the tablet and installing an APK.
I also play Simpons Tapped Out on my Fire as well as several other world building games.
Coincidentally, this device is also being discussed in the current thread Can anybody recommend an inexpensive tablet JUST for watching videos?
I wouldn’t go that far. It’s a good deal but the superior Lenovo Tab 2 A8 (larger & better resolution screen, faster processor) for instance sells for less than $120.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the Tab 2 A8 is a better deal at twice the Fire price, just that the Fire isn’t spec’d as a $200 tablet.
Still truly amazing, just not uniquely so. But compared to what you could get for the same price a few decades or even a few years ago, most of today’s tablets are pretty mind-blowing.
Amazon has it’s own app store. But it’s still an Android device. Most of the usual popular apps on the Google app store are also on the Amazon one. There’s some exception such as Kodi (Amazon is an idiot), but you can sideload those.
You can install the Google Play programs (note, plural) on the Fire tablet but it has to be done right. It’s easier still if you use Rootjunkie’s rooting method to root and do other things to make it more like a normal Android device.
The best online resource for info about this tablet and how to do what is over at XDA Developers. (In general, the best resource for Android stuff.) The Fire tablet forum is here. An alternate term for the Google Play stuff there is “GAPPS”.
As to real cost: Yeah, fairly close to $100 rather than approaching $200.
Sorry to bump this thread, but I’m trying to help my mom with an Amazon Fire that she was gifted from my uncle: she wants it to be set up in a way that I’m 90 percent sure can’t be done.
Quick summary: my mom is a small business owner, and she used to have a tablet, that she used to run credit and debit transactions. Somebody broke into the store and stole the tablet, and unc gave her his Amazon Fire to replace the tablet. As I understand it, in order for the Fire to do what she wants it to do, I have to register the SIM and have the device enabled on her mobile network… Except, as near as I can tell, this thing doesn’t have a SIM nor does it even have any place that is accessible to a regular user that a SIM could go.
I think I’ve asked Bing the right questions, and the answers I’ve found support the idea that I can’t make this thing do what my mom wants it to do. I’m asking the Dope because I don’t necessarily trust my Bing-fu, and I want to make sure that I’m not overlooking something obvious. According to the settings screen, the device model is Amazon Fire (5th generation). Can this thing be set up for a mobile network?
It is a Wi-Fi only device, no cell phone connection is possible.
The only card slot it has is for a microSD storage card.
It can be used as a phone of sorts using VoIP software/Google Voice/etc. But that is thru the Wi-Fi connection.
That’s what I thought, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing something. Thanks!
Mine works well – I read lots of Russian books on it.
I do not know what is the production cost of Kindle Fire – how can we find out?
Definitely. And yet technology did little to make us happier.
The Kindle Fire is not a topic of this thread. See thread title.
As to the Fire, Googling for teardown info reveals a few things:
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Previously, Amazon has admitted to losing $10+ on older low end tablets on the hardware alone. Factor in other costs and the loss goes up.
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One site guesstimated a basic manufacturing cost of almost $50. But reading the analysis suggests they really were guessing. They left out some key costs. So, even using their numbers + correction gives a lower bound of $60. And this doesn’t include the cost of the software!!! Creating and maintaining a special version of their Android-ish OS plus utilities for each model is far from cheap. And they roll out updates on a regular basis. You just can’t ignore this part at all.
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Too many tech sites can’t tell the difference between the Kindle Fire and the Fire. Good grief, get the name of the product right. The last thing you want to do is make someone think they should try and buy an out of date product.
Thank you – indeed Amazon sells tablets well below manufacturing cost.