My wife has an iPad mini that she uses constantly. It's a lot easier to on the eyes than browsing and using apps on a smartphone is. Yet it's lighter and not much bigger than a book. True, it's not as portable as a smartphone is, and I wouldn't give up my dedicated Kindle Paperwhite for one. But for indoor use with WiFi, you can't beat it.I was suffering from tablet envy, but I couldn't bring myself to spending another several hundred dollars for even a cheaper Android tablet. Then a few months ago, Amazon came out with this.
$50? Are you kidding me? At that price it's practically disposable. Even if it doesn't do everything I wanted it to do, if it's still useful, I'd live with it. I figured that I'd probably get frustrated with its limitations pretty quickly, especially being used recent generation iPads. But for $50, I'd give it a try.
Folks, it's worth it, and then some. OK, it has low res front and rear cameras. The fact that it has any cameras at all is rather amazing. Not that I even bother using them. Yeah, it only has 8 GB of internal memory, but most of my programs and all of my pictures, videos, and music are on a 32 GB microSD card I sprung for it ($10). I now have just about every app I would want on it, and still have some room on board for more.
OK, it's a loss leader for Amazon, runs on their stripped down version of Android that some apps won't run on, and is a generation behind the curve on performance. But it works amazingly well. They did a good job of making it reasonably snappy and it uses a reasonably modern quad core processor with graphics acceleration. OK, its resolution isn't even 720p, but at 7 inches diagonal, movies run smoothly and they look good enough. There's no mistaking the text resolution as competing with an Apple "retina display" on their devices, but it's readable enough with small fonts. OK, maybe it's not nearly as readable as reading a book on a Paperwhite Kindle is, but it's OK.
$10 for a decent case and another $10 for a 32 GB microSD card, and you're done. But wait, there's more. They offered it for $35 during Thanksgiving week, so I bought two more as gifts. I should have bought more. Never lacking for being cheeky, Amazon also sells them in six packs (buy five, get one free).
Do I recommend it? YES! Especially if you're an Amazon Prime member (it's great for shopping, reading Kindle books, and using it with Prime Video and Music). It's certainly not a high end tablet, but you are getting a lot more than you paid for it. And for 90% of what you'd want a tablet for, this gets the job done.
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