Amazon just launched a new version of its wildly popular $50 tablet
Amazon
The Fire 7 costs $49.99, while the Fire HD 8 now starts at $79.99, down from its usual $89.99.
The upgrades here are very modest. Amazon says the new Fire 7 is a pinch lighter and thinner than the the last model (it's now 9.6mm thick, versus 10.6mm before), and that it'll have slightly better battery life this time around (it's rated at eight hours per charge, up from seven).
Amazon is adding dual-band WiFi support, too, though there's still nothing for faster 802.11ac connections. The tablets also come in red, blue, and yellow, as well as the standard black.
Most notably, Amazon says the Fire 7's 7-inch display will have "sharper text" and higher contrast than before, so it should look a bit more vibrant. That said, it's not upgrading from a very good display, and Amazon says the screen's resolution will stay at a fairly low 1024 x 600. We'll have to see how it holds up in testing.
Gus Ruelas/Reuters
The Fire HD 8, meanwhile, looks to be near exactly the same as before. It's just $10 cheaper, and comes in new colors. You can now add a little more storage with a microSD card; otherwise, compared to the Fire 7, your extra $30 still goes toward a bigger and sharper 8-inch 1280 x 800 display, a beefier 1.5 GB of RAM, up to 12 hours of battery life, and more starting storage. (The Fire 7 comes in 8 GB and 16 GB options, and the Fire HD 8 gets you 16 GB or 32 GB of space.)
Amazon is also refreshing the "Kids Edition" of the Fire 7 ($99), and introducing one for the Fire HD 8 ($129). Those come with more durable designs and a year's subscription to the company's kid-friendly "FreeTime Unlimited" content service.
Amazon
As you can guess, these Fire tablets are not "premium" like the iPad or Microsoft Surface Pro. Instead, they're Trojan horses - their software makes it very easy to buy things from Amazon's e-commerce store and use first-party services like Alexa and Prime Video, so Amazon wants to get them onto as many couches as possible.
The upshot for consumers is that, even if you ignore all the Amazon stuff, the last Fire 7 and Fire HD 8 were competent enough to be a good value for anyone who only uses their tablet for casual reading and video viewing. The former should be a bit better now, but we'll see if Amazon hasn't saturated the market completely.
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