I’ve never really been a fan of tablet devices. When I want to actually do something I would much rather have a computer and my phone is good enough for mindlessly consuming garbage. This means I’ve never really wanted an iPad even though they are super slick devices.
I often feel jealous of tablet owners when flying because watching videos on your phone can get boring after a while. However, I could never justify spending money on an iPad for this purpose.
The other day the Fire HD 10 was on a pretty solid sale. Since I have a few trips coming up, I got the 64GB version for 85 dollars.
Its back to full price now but I suspect it might drop again for Prime Day or in the future.
Having previously worked in the Kindle group at Amazon, I was aware that these devices were quite underpowered. However, considering that we are now on version 13 of them, I assumed that they are now capable of doing a decent job of playing video.
So far I have been really happy with it. The video playback is really solid and while the touch response isn’t as good as the iPad its not bad and it feels pretty usable. The Apps for Netflix, Plex, etc seem to all work fine from the Amazon store. Just this level of functionality was enough for me to justify the purchase.
I also wanted to see what it would take to get Google Play Services up and running and how well that would work. There are several guides for this which all amount to downloading some apks from apkmirror and installing them locally. The entire process is okay, but it is a bit tedious. However, the site appears sketchy enough to make me hesitant to trust my device with storing my important personal accounts on it. I decided to just make a new google account for the Fire to access the Play Store since I just wanted to download a few apps and won’t be doing any real work on this device that I don’t really trust as much as my iOS devices.
After that I could install the App for Wyze Devices, Google Meet etc and they seemed to work fine. All in all pretty happy with the purchase.
I went for the 64GB version so i could download as much media as possible but I suspect the 32GB version which is only $140 not on sale would also be fine. As of this writing the Fire Max 11 (64GB) is currently on sale for $140 as well. So its worth checking the prices before deciding.
Oh I also got the cover but I am not really happy with it. I don’t think its worth the weight for protecting such a cheap device and the stand function isn’t really great.
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