Amazon has just released its cheapest Fire tablet yet. But is it good enough? David Crookes asks whether we’re only getting what we pay for with the rising number of £50 tablets
In November, a new Apple tablet is set to be released in time for the Christmas rush. Called the iPad Pro, it’s being billed as thin, light and epic, and it is certainly bigger than any other iPad, with a 5.6 million pixel Retina screen measuring 12.9 inches.
It has refined Multi-Touch technology and the ability to edit 4K video, as well as a A9X chip, which provides a CPU performance almost double that of the iPad Air 2. It also has a new peripheral called the Apple Pencil. “Who wants a stylus?” Apple founder Steve Jobs famously asked when the iPhone was revealed in 2007. ‘Apple’ is the answer today.
But for Apple, it’s seemingly all about expanding the range and the size of its tablet offering, and bigger certainly appears to be better according to its current philosophy. The iPhone gained extra height last year, and the latest model of the iPad is now following suit. But it also follows that with a larger iPad comes a higher price. An iPad Air 2 starts from £399, and the iPad Pro is expected to retail at around £600.
Yet there’s a flipside to all this. Amazon has also been busy with its own range of Fire tablets, and it too has a new addition as it continues to transition from being a mere retailer of other company’s products into a creator of its own tech. The one new Fire tablet that has been catching the most attention is about as far removed from the iPad Pro as you could get. It is an altogether more basic machine. And it costs just £49.99.
Before we take a look at what this device is and what it does, let us first consider what Amazon is actually trying to do. As we all know, the company started as a seller of books, but it has been widening its scope for many years, and now it sells just about anything you could imagine wanting to buy. Along the way, there have been some changing patterns of buying behaviour, not least the move to digital.
Amazon spotted this early and created its ebook reader, the Kindle. This has allowed the company to ride the fall in physical book purchases and capitalise on digital buys. Buoyed by that success, it then saw that people were switching from DVDs and Blu-rays to streaming, so it snapped up Lovefilm, created Amazon Prime Video and started to offer the content on its own range of tablets.
Those tablets have enabled the company to tap into new revenue streams, not least by allowing Amazon to set up its own potentially lucrative app store. But they have also been successful, and a key element to this has been the low price of some of the models. While the iPad Pro also has less expensive siblings – the forthcoming iPad Mini 4 among them – Apple has nothing that can be purchased for the price of a decent meal for two.
You’re Fired
The £49.99 Amazon Fire therefore has the ability to pick up many sales and further reduce the iPad’s market share. This may well worry Apple, which has already seen the iPad’s portion of the tablet cake fall to some 25%. But is it actually worth buying? After all, the cheapest Amazon Fire is pulling in a different direction: it’s sticking with the familiar 7” screen offered by many other small tablets, including the Google Nexus 7 and the original Tesco Hudl, and it doesn’t even have an accompanying crayon, let alone a chunky hi-tech pencil.
Yet you only have to look at the Amazon website to see which feature it’s promoting first and foremost. “Unbelievable price,” it says, and there’s no doubting that it is. The situation is also more jaw-dropping in America where the tablet is retailing for even less: a staggering $49.99. And, as if to underline just how cheap it is, there’s a six-pack bundle for $249.99 which, in effect, means Amazon is giving one away free for every five that are bought.
Amazon’s Fire tablet has therefore become a throwaway device, albeit one you may actually want to keep. At this price, it’s a drug, luring in customers, getting them hooked into the Amazon ecosystem and making them feel euphoric at having bagged a bargain. At the same time, it’s perhaps something that you would risk taking away on holiday with you and not worry about dropping it in the pool. Surely it’s a no brainer of a purchase?
Certainly, on the face of it, the Amazon Fire is a decent little device. It looks far better than other tablets in this price range, and the screen, with a resolution of 1024x600 at 171ppi, has a wide viewing angle and a great contrast level. It comes with a quad-core 1.3GHz processor and 8GB of storage as standard. It also has mono sound, a built-in microphone and two cameras.
The Amazon Fire will last you the bulk of the day if you use it heavily, with the company promising up to seven hours of reading, web surfing, video watching and music listening. It’s durable too. Amazon boasts that in “tumble tests”, the latest iPad Air is twice as likely to break than the Fire.
When buying the machine, there are also a few extras to consider (or dismiss). Among them is a choice of case, which is faintly ridiculous given they cost as much as £19.99 – why add a significant percentage sum to the price? We’re also surprised that Amazon even bothers to add the option of a £19.99 two-year Protection Plan and a £9.99 screen protector. But even casting those attempts at grabbing extra cash to one side, there are some other niggles concerning the device itself.
The Limitations
First of all, you may find the Fire limiting in some respects. While the basic resolution still makes the screen watchable, you certainly can’t be expecting the Amazon Fire at this price to be on a par with anything that Apple is making. The cameras are merely adequate, since the rear is 2MP with 720p HD video recording and the front is VGA, meaning they simply ‘do a job’; we’d be surprised if we saw adverts showing a photograph with the tagline ‘taken by the cheapo Amazon Fire’ plastered along the bottom.
At the same time, the processor is made by Mediatek, which teamed up with Amazon on the New Fire HD tablets last year. The company tweeted the Forbes website to let it know that the CPU is a MediaTek MT8135, which is made up of two A15s and two A7s. That means the technology is adequate, but it may well be slower than you want it to be over extended periods of use. When coupled with 1GB of RAM, this issue will be intensified depending on what you’re using the tablet for.
It also transpires that of the 8GB of storage available, just 5GB of it can be used to store various media, which includes games, videos, books and apps. With the size of files getting ever larger, you will soon find that you run out of space.
Thankfully, the Amazon Fire can be expanded, but it comes at a cost. A 32GB micro-SD card will be an extra £11.99, 64GB is £19.99 and 128GB is £53.99, but at least it’s removable. Even so, the prices are certainly small enough for your wallet to cope, yet in comparison to the price of the tablet, it can start to niggle at your sense of a bargain.
The same is true with the special offers and sponsored screensavers that you have to put up with in order to take advantage of the £49.99 price. This has long been the case with Kindle tablets, but to remove them will cost you an extra tenner. Then you get to the matter of the operating system. The vast majority of tablets in this price range rely on the ever dependable and widely used Android operating system, which ensures you have access to Google Play and all of the benefits of Google products. The latest Fire runs a version of OS Fire that is dubbed Bellini.
For those wanting a seamless switch from Android, this will continue to be an annoyance. It means you have to repurchase apps, films, books and games from Amazon, assuming they’re available. That said, Amazon does point to having more than 38 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, apps and games, and the Fire also provides unlimited access to more than $10,000 worth of paid apps, games and in-app purchases. It’s a sweetener that tastes good until you realise that, when you narrow it down, there are actually only 300,000 apps which is roughly the number in the Windows Phone Store. By comparison, Statista points to 1.6 million apps in the App Store and 1.5 million in Google Play.
Software Perks
You soon realise that the Amazon Fire is less a tablet about cutting-edge technology but more about tying you into all things Amazon, and yet some of the services are very appetising. Indeed, this is where things start to really look up for the Fire. There are benefits for those willing to splash out £79.99 each year for Prime membership, including downloading Prime Instant Video films and television programmes, which can be viewed offline, as well as more than a million songs, thousands of audiobooks and many more ebooks. There’s also unlimited cloud storage for content and photos that you take on the device.
On top of that is access to features that are exclusive to Amazon. The Fire may be offered at a cut-down price, but Amazon is not skimping on the breadth of the services that users of the lower-end tablet can enjoy. They include Advanced Streaming and Prediction (ASAP), which looks at what a user likes to watch and pre-buffers programmes and films in anticipation, and X-Ray, which can translate text in Kindle books and provides extra information about your read.
The tablet also allows for the Second Screen feature, so you can connect it up to the Amazon Instant Video app running on the Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick or PlayStation. Plus there’s FreeTime, which provides access to lots of goodies for children; Family Library, which lets people link two Amazon accounts and share books; and Word Runner, which helps you to read faster (so you buy greater numbers of novels, we would guess).
Prime members can also use On Deck, which keeps the Fire tablet current with popular Prime movies and TV shows, as well as Amazon Original Series such as the forthcoming show with former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson. And if you get stuck, you can contact customer services with Mayday Screen Saving, which lets an Amazon tech advisor guide you through the tablet’s features by drawing on the screen or showing you each step.
It is these aspects of the Amazon Fire that make the tablet worth considering. Without them, it is simply a tablet at a price low enough to make for an impulse purchase that you can throw around, forgiving any shortcomings that would otherwise eat away at your expectations. With them, the tablet becomes an intriguing, almost must-have prospect, especially if you’re already a big fan of Amazon and have already amassed a sizeable library of content.
One positive aspect of tying into the Amazon ecosystem is that what you lose out on in terms of the number of apps available, you gain in terms of cross-platform usability. Kindle books can be read across all devices, for example, and you can also watch purchased programmes and films on your television. It very much depends on what you want to use your tablet for: among the 300,000 apps, there are the big hitters of social media and lots of games, some made by Amazon’s own gaming studio and so initially exclusive. You could always find a way to root your Fire to install the Google Play store. It may well void your warranty, but at this price, do you actually care? If nothing else, you’ll learn a new skill.
Rise Of The Low-Priced
The Amazon Fire is not the only cheap tablet around, though, and we’re already at the point where some machines are costing less than some iPad cases. One of them is a brightly coloured thing called the Dragon Touch. At £42.71, this is another 7” tablet with the same amount of storage space as the Amazon Fire, albeit with the bonus of running Android 4.4, yet it also has a less powerful CPU than the Fire.
Some Dragon Touches have been reported as having a low battery life and charging problems, but they will run Google Play and they have filter software called Zoodles that make them child friendly (although you’ll be able to find this in Google Play). Reviews for the machine are a mixed bag but some people casting their opinion seem to expect a fully featured tablet at this price. That is never going to happen, and it’s silly to even think that such tablets will beat the higherend offerings from the likes of Samsung and Apple. In many instances you get what you pay for, and it ultimately comes down to what you think you’ll be using the tablet for.
If you’re looking for a device that will let you surf the web, check emails and consume media, then these inexpensive tablets are certainly worth considering rather than the more expensive offerings. They’re built for this very purpose, and they’re aiming themselves at a market that isn’t seeking to stretch the boundaries of a tablet by pushing it into becoming a workstation or something on which you want to edit videos.
For so many people, a computer is the go-to for the most demanding tasks, and a tablet is simply something that offers a more pleasurable, larger screen for reading and entertainment. To that extent, the Amazon Fire and the Dragon Touch have the potential to eat into the market share of the iPad, and it’s most likely why some fairly well-known names such as Lenovo, Huawei and LG are entering this space.
One of the most impressive low-end products is the Lenovo TAB 2 A7-10, which we’ve seen for sale at just £51.96, down from a retail price of a smidgen over £70. It is very similar to the Fire, with a 7” wide-angle viewing screen at 1024 x 600, and a MediaTek CPU – specifically a MT8127 1.4GHz quad-core. It also has Dolby audio with a front-facing speaker and, crucially, it’s powered by Android 4.4 KitKat (upgradable to Lollipop), which means you’re not restricted to a proprietary operating system like the Amazon Fire. There is also satellite GPS.
For a little bit more – around £60 if you look hard enough – you could try the Huawei MediaPad T1 7.0. It has the same resolution as the Lenovo and a slightly slower 1.2GHz Spreadtrum SC7731G CPU, but it has Android 4.4.2 overlaid with Huawei Emotion UI 3.0. Both its front and rear cameras are 2MP, and it looks great. With a thickness of just 8.5mm and weighing 278g, it claims to be able to browse the web for up to eight hours and allow you to watch up to 12 hours of movies. It also boasts a standby time of more than 300 hours.
Not to be outdone but costing more than the other tablets here is the LG G Pad 7.0 Tablet. It isn’t a name that trips off the tongue, but it does show what an extra spend will get you. For more than twice the price of the Amazon Fire, you can get yourself a five megapixel rear camera with a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The tablet is also powered by a quad-core Snapdragon processor, yet just 8GB storage like the others. Even so, there are some nice innovations to make up for it, from the intuitive keyboard to the ability to pair the G Pad to an Android smartphone via a system called LG Qpair 2.0. The screen can also split in two so apps can be used in each half. This is a feature the iPad has only begun benefitting from.
If this is the price bracket you’re looking to tap into, then the options widen further. Tesco’s Hudl 2 remains a very attractive tablet, and it’s clear the supermarket giant is keen to pull out all of the stops in order to get people using it. From a choice of colours to the 8.3” full HD touchscreen and Dolby sound, the feature-set is jaw-droppingly good: how about 2GB of RAM and an Intel Atom quad-core processor? Android KitKat? And how about getting all of this for £99? What makes this even more remarkable is that if you have enough Clubcard Vouchers, then you can bag this baby for £50, because every £5 in vouchers is turned into £10 when you’re buying this tablet.
This quality and potential price is the real game changer here, and it makes it better than so many other tablets in its bracket. Still competitions remains, though. The Linx 7” tablet with a 1.83GHz Intel Atom Z3735G and 32GB of storage is a great offering that is more than capable of functioning as a handheld games tablet. It uses Windows 8, and it can be upgraded to Windows 10. But at £89.99, you may feel as if you’re not getting enough extra performance for your money when compared to the cheaper alternatives. In comparison to an iPad Mini, though, it’s well worth thinking about.
Yet this is precisely what Apple will not want people to do. For a long time, £50 tablets have been poor quality, with resistive screens and cheap innards, often speedily knocked out in Chinese factories to make the unknown manufacturers slapping their brands on them a quick buck. But that has changed. The Amazon Fire and Hudl 2 make very good cases for your money, and they should also cause you to reassess what you actually want a tablet for. It will also make it harder and harder for Apple to persuade potential customers that its allsinging and all-dancing range of tablets are 12 times as good.
This is perhaps why it’s looking to corner the business and professional market with the iPad Pro, knowing that a £50 tablet is unlikely to be able to appeal to those in this space for a long time. The higher-end products that the major companies are producing will come to only be appreciated by the most heavy and demanding users, whereas so many millions will feel they’re getting great value from a less expensive tablet that can so easily be cast aside for a dearer model if the need ever arose. It may not be good news for less well known names (Otterbox, which makes the 77-5097_Defender case for iPad Air 2 at £49.64 must feel severely threatened by the low-end invasion by the big boys), but it’s just the way the market is going.
That’s because more and more tablets are hitting the £50 point. Indeed, Archos recently updated the 70 Xenon with the 70B Xenon, complete with its 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage and dual-core processor. It will no doubt struggle to shift too many given the specs, but it may spark a new race to the bottom with slightly less well specced machines going below the £50 mark in a bid to grab consumer cash (although we will draw the line at companies such as Lexibook claiming a 4.3” screen to be a tablet!).
Time will tell whether or not these tablets will eventually come to utterly destroy the iPad’s market share or whether Apple will look to create its own true budget machine. It wouldn’t be entirely desirable to see such a thing happen, since ambition and the pushing of boundaries is what keeps technology moving on. Yet good, affordable tech is just as crucial because, in this case at least, it can introduce larger numbers of people to the delights of computing. Tablets for the masses? When they work as well as some of the products on the market, they’re not a bad medicine, are they?