I love my Fire H8, except for the bizarre autocorrect. The sight that seems to work least we’ll with the tablets I’ve used (iPad 2 and Samsung)? This one.
Correction: my SO’s tablet is a pre-owned refurbished Surface 3 for $200. Doing a factory reset right now because the seller (Factory Certified Deals) didn’t bother doing that themselves.
I have an iPad for traveling because we refuse to buy iPhones. It comes in handy for finding local businesses, checking the weather, and getting around in an unfamiliar town.
I once travelled to Barcelona for business. I extended my trip by a couple of days for personal touring, as I like to do, and one day I rented a motorcycle and went exploring. I’d downloaded some offline maps. You don’t need any wifi or cell signal, you just use its internal GPS on the preloaded maps. Getting around was easy, certainly not as easy as using a full-blown GPS giving every turn, but you’d have to prexenter destinations. It was fun exploring the hectic city (weekday) on the bike. I used a caribiner to clip it to the handlebar near the triple clamp and just left it running, checking it every once in a while.
You can do this on a smart phone but I really like maps on a tablet and its larger screen size.
For what it’s worth, we have both an iPad and a Fire HD 10. The wife trades off between the iPad and her laptop. I bounce between the Fire and the desktop. Both of the tablets are just fine for what we want to do with them, which is mainly web-based entertainment and light word processing. Debate has moved into completely on-line posting and balloting, so the Fire gets a workout every weekend and has given me zero problems.
It doesn’t look like the Fire HD has GPS.
the thing ive heard about fires is there walled in to amazon as in you have to get everything through them
if you want to get anything amazon doesn’t want you to is you have to get it rooted aka jailbreaking
Decide on an OS
Not true.
I have loaded documents (books and others) onto my Kindle Fire via USB and e-mail from non-Amazon sources. Haven’t done a lot with apps, though, they might be a problem, can’t speak to that. But no, you aren’t completely restricted to Amazon and only Amazon content.
As far as I understand it, the Fire tablets, although they are essentially Android-based, can’t access the Google Play app store - so they will be limited to the subset of apps available on the Amazon app store.
It’s not hard to get individual Android apps on the Kindle, or you can just install the Google Play store and proceed as normal.
But the Kindle app store is pretty big these days. You’ll probably find what you’re looking for or something similar without too much effort.
Bugger. I should have added -
The Play store involves rooting it, however, which I really don’t recommend, but the individual apps process is simple enough.
I like that I can get the Fire HD 8, 32 GB, with Alexa, without adds, for $125. I don’t know where Mrs. L.A. gets her games. She probably googles ‘games’ and downloads them from whatever site. My only experience with apps is with a flashlight (used ‘for real’ once), a GPS-based speedometer (fun to see how fast we’re going on the airplane), Waze (not particularly useful), a chromatic tuner, and a calculator. I got them all from Google Store. I’d like to get Uber (there’s an icon for it, but it doesn’t work), some streaming entertainment apps, and such, but my phone doesn’t have enough memory. The point is (Can you tell I haven’t had coffee yet?) the HD Fire will probably have enough ‘stuff’ on it for her uses and enjoyment.
It would be nice to have GPS (really nice) and not be ‘locked into’ Amazon, but I think the Fire is probably sufficient for now. If there are other options in the price range, let me know!
$125 looks like a great price. No way an Apple device would cost that little.
At this point I’m deferring a tablet for myself, and $125 is a good price considering my financial worries.
The Fire can take an external microSD card up to 256gb if you need more space. One nice thing about the Amazon tablets is you can download stuff to watch off-line, but your storage fills up quickly.
That’s good to know about the external storage.
It looks like the Fire HD is the one to get.
[ul][li]It fits the budget. Other suggestions are too expensive for me right now;[/li][li]It seems adequate for a new tablet user;[/li][li]There have been several positive remarks about it in this thread;[/li][li]It has good reviews on Amazon.[/ul][/li]
If I’m not convinced otherwise, I’ll plan on ordering Wifey the Fire HD later today.
Thanks!
Get a keyboard/case for it at the same time. The tablet pops in/out easily, and the keyboard is essential for extended typing.
I have no idea why people persist in repeating this trivially refuted myth.
Oh, and jailbreaking is not the same thing as rooting. All current Fire tablets and such can be jailbroken to allow installing apps from other sources via a simple setting. People install Google Play on them all the time. I installed an app from the Play store on my Fire 7" just two days ago. If you want root access on these, you’ve got a real chore on your hands.
Being more informed about these matters wouldn’t hurt.
Mrs. L.A. is even less tech-savvy than I am. I put in the rather complicated Xfinity password so she could connect to Wi-Fi in the house. It took her a while just to register the Fire HD I got her for Christmas. She tried to play with it a bit (‘Show me the weather.’), and then said, ‘It looks like you can only buy stuff with it. I guess I could use it to buy stuff.’
I googled, and showed her what the browser icon looks like. So far, she hasn’t had a lot of time to see what she can do on it. I know she’d like to have access to her email, but she doesn’t remember her password. There’s an email icon on the Home screen. Can she get to her Yahoo email with that? Or does she have to go through the browser? I told her that she can download movies and TV with her Amazon Prime account, but she doesn’t really watch anything that’s not on the cable. She can download games of course, but she probably thinks it’s easier to just play them on her phone. She took a picture with the camera.
I’d really like her to like the tablet, so I’m still looking for suggestions as to what she can do with it. As I said, right now she says it looks like it’s just for buying stuff.