Amazon announced a number of new products on Thursday including an Android-powered tablet that costs only $49.99. That’s dirt cheap compared to other tablets of the same size, and the old saying “you get what you pay for” doesn’t seem to apply here. Simply called Fire, Amazon indicates that it’s a high-quality tablet packed with a 7-inch IPS screen, a quad-core processor and cameras on the front and back.
“The all-new Fire features a quad-core processor, is incredibly durable, and is backed by the Amazon content ecosystem, the new Amazon Underground, and Amazon customer service with Mayday Screen Sharing. Fire sets a new bar for what customers should expect from a low cost tablet,” says Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO.
The specifications reveal that the four processor cores are clocked up to 1.3 GHz. As expected, the storage aspect is rather small, 8GB to be exact, but customers can increase the capacity up to an extra 128 GB of storage thanks to a microSD card slot. The battery promises up to 7 hours on a single charge.
Additional specs provided by Amazon include a 1024x600 (171 ppi) resolution, 1 GB of RAM, a single speaker, a built-in microphone, a 3.5mm stereo jack, a VGA camera on the front, and a 2MP camera on the back, which is capable of 720p HD video recording. The tablet also has single-band Wireless-N connectivity, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a microUSB 2.0 port.
According to the company, the Fire tablet is highly durable, twice that of Apple’s iPad Air 2. The device also features a new version of Amazon’s Android-based Fire OS operating system: Fire OS 5 “Bellini.” This platform provides an updated magazine-like user interface, a feature called Family Library, a new Amazon Underground service packed with over $10K in apps, a service dubbed as Word Runner for reading faster, and more.
“For Prime members, On Deck automatically keeps your Fire tablet current with popular Prime movies and TV shows, as well as Amazon Original Series, so you always have something good to watch,” the press release boasts. “Importantly, On Deck only uses the available storage on your tablet, opportunistically in a special shadow mode. When you download something, On Deck automatically makes room for your selected content—there’s no hassle of needing to clear out space yourself.”
Amazon says that the new $49.99 tablet will begin shipping on September 30. Based on the low price, Amazon seemingly assumes that customers may want to purchase more than one. That said, the company is offering one free Fire tablet when five tablets are purchased together. Simply use the FIRE6PACK promo code at checkout.
For the money, customers seem to be getting a good deal. The resolution could be better, but what helps make this tablet a decent buy is its microSD card reader, which supports 128GB of storage. Amazon also provides its Mayday support service to help customers that seemingly can’t figure out how to use a 7-inch tablet.
In addition to the $49.99 tablet, Amazon also announced the new Amazon Fire TV Gaming Edition set-top-box, a new Fire Kids Edition tablet, a new Amazon Fire TV with 4K Ultra HD set-top-box, a new Fire TV Stick with a voice remote, and two new Fire HD tablets with 8-inch and 10.1-inch screens. Thursday was a busy day for Amazon!
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1NGEStr
