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Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

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Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#61

Post by jugad »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #48
bsilvereagle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#62

Post by calm_245 »

Zelphyr wrote: post #45

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 w…

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

Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#63

Post by byron_fast »

Splines wrote: post #46
byron_fast wrote: post #36

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.

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…

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.

Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#64

Post by webwanderings »

webwanderings wrote: post #34

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.

Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#66

Post by kyriakos »

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.

Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#68

Post by JohnTHaller »

calm_245 wrote: post #62
Zelphyr wrote: post #45

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 w…

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.

Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#69

Post by Splines »

byron_fast wrote: post #63
Splines wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Amazon's New $50 Fire Tablet

#70

Post by ktsmith »

Zelphyr wrote: post #45

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 w…

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.

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