Amazon Fire 7 tablet | 7" display, 16 GB, latest model (2022 release), Black with Ads

This is my first Amazon tablet and I wasn’t sure what to expect given the devices extremely low price and specs (relative to other tablets, especially the latest iPads). However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality, size and battery life of the device. The display isn’t HD but it’s good enough for general browsing using amazons silk browser and reading eBooks. The text can sometimes appear small on the 7 inch display but adjusting display and accessibility settings allows you to get a decent text size for readability. While regular ebooks look good… magazines and textbooks require a fair amount of zooming to read text and diagrams. I think this is where the 10 inch Fire tablet is better recommended. Watching movies is ok but you’re only going to get SD level quality here, it’s ok for the occasional TV show but movies deserve a better screen. I’d say it’s alright if you temper expectations on this front. The display doesn’t appear to be glass so I recommend getting either the official case or a screen protector. Sound is ok as it only comes from a mono speaker but I found it passable for general audio and listening to audiobooks. While watching video I’d recommend either wired or Bluetooth headphones The weight of the tablet is good… I think on par with the iPad mini and therefore a decent weight to hold for prolonged periods while reading books. It feels good in the hand and feels of good quality. The tablet isn’t the fastest but it’s not painfully slow either. In my usage with browsing the web, Audible, Prime Video and Kindle it’s been pretty responsive for the most part. The Fire OS is a decent OS if you’re using a lot of Amazon services. Battery life is pretty good and close to the 10 hours claimed by Amazon. Standby times are excellent. Overall if you have expectations in check given the tablets price and use a lot of Amazon services, it’s a good buy. What I like most is its size, so few tablets are small like this these days and it’s great to carry around a device I can read ebooks and browse the web on that doesn’t weigh much, has long battery life and is way way cheaper than an iPad mini. I still have a mini but I really like this device and its price means you don’t worry about dropping a 500 plus device while out and about, staying in hospital, traveling etc. I’d say it’s a really decent tablet for Amazons lowest price Fire device.

As long as you are clear for what you want to use this tablet for then it is a great piece of kit. We got it on a Amazon Prime day earlier this year and love the size of it - a real one hand job. The picture when you run a film or stream a programme is crystal clear and can download most streaming apps - but check the tablet specs if you have a specific one you want. For example you have to watch You Tube through the browser. I use the tablet to read news, sport, library books, listen to music and watch TV and streaming services. You will need a bluetooth speaker as the speaker is very quiet but it still gets 5 stars due to the Prime Day value and the ideal size for your bag or "cargo shorts" pocket! Two things to note - the "ads" are just on the lock screen which if you want to display your own photo you can't and if you are playing music and the screen is locked you just need to swipe down from the top and you'll find the music controls. I know some people say it's a pain to unlock the screen every time you want to pause your music but you don't - just swipe down from the top :0)

I've been using Kindles pretty much ever since they were first released. I still have my trusty Kindle Keyboard 3, from about 12-13 years ago. It isn't supported by Amazon anymore, but it's perfect for me to just send over books & PDFs from by laptop via USB. I love this model so much: the keyboard for typing notes was really useful to someone like me (who actually waffles on quite a lot in my note-taking) it feels so light and comfortable in the hand, and the non-backlit digital ink on a screen the colour of paper...? Chef's kiss! I will be using this old model mainly for the classics and their subsequent supplementary reading materials. Seems appropriate. (It was also a present from the other half, so it has sentimental meaning to me: he knew how much I loved to read and thought it the perfect present for one so enamoured with books. He was right!) My second Kindle purchase was one of these 7" Kindle Fire things. At first I didn't like it that much because it was heavier than my KK3. I purchased it so that I could have something where I could use both the Kindle store and my Goodreads account, together with what I was reading...and it definitely served that purpose. I did get used to the weight over time, but I still find myself needing to use one of those covers that flips into a stand to take the weight off my arthritic hands and arms a lot of the time. I did find having the inclusion of a browser quite handy as I don't use a iPhone to run my life or access the internet (I don't even know where my phone is right now to be honest...nor do I care!) and sometimes it's handy for accessing maps, directions - even the old 'Infinite Jest' wiki that really helped bring that book to life for me when I first read it! My third Kindle purchase was another Kindle Fire 7" thingy. I'd been noticing problems with the charging dock of my other Kindle Fire and wasn't sure where I'd need to send it off to get it repaired by someone who legitimately fixes these things and doesn't just charge you £50 for the consultation which inevitably results in nothing more than that "can't do it love, sorry" shrug. I wanted to still have a Kindle on the go so I bought this second one, transferred over all the books I still wanted to have, thinking "I'll get around to getting the other one fixed sooner or later." (Technically, that is still valid as 'later' was a pretty open-ended target to set myself.) I can't see it being something insanely difficult to fix. The charging cord would only work if the wire was twisted at a certain angle, but eventually that also stopped working. I'm guessing it's just a minor connection in the charging dock that needs a small adjustment in order for the power to get into the battery, because when the cord was still doing that weird thing where it would charge up at *just* the right angle, it was still charging the entire thing as quickly as it should be doing and there was no noticeable reduction in battery life once recharged. (I really do need to look into that one, because I want to get it fixed and then figure it into my grand masterplan regarding why any sane person would need to own 4 Kindles.) And I've been using that 3rd Kindle / my 2nd Kindle Fire, for a couple of years now and it's still working like magic. I like that I can add extra storage to it via the mini SanDisk memory card, because I have a lot of PDF documents (theses, obscure out of print texts scanned and uploaded with varying levels of quality, government bills, peer reviewed studies, etc) and having something portable that you can easily whip out to show someone exactly what media or research you're discussing. I'm not sure, because I am not remotely tech-savvy, but I've gotten it into my head that if I keep all of the stored data on the disk, it is possibly putting less stress on the Kindle Fire itself, when it's accessing other operations or functions? I may have made that up in my own head at some point, so don't quote me on that. So, Kindle #3 / My 2nd Kindle Fire, is still up and running perfectly. I love that I can use dark-mode for all the OS functions, whilst also creating dark-mode in eBooks themselves. It's just so much easier on the eyes too, (especially if you read a lot in the evening and only ever put the "big light" on for really important stuff, like trying to locate a phone that you haven't seen all week, but are going to need to set an alarm on it in the next few days - other than that, everyone knows that the "big light" is harsh, unfriendly and deeply unflattering to anyone unlucky enough to be caught by its malevolent death-rays.) I use this Kindle Fire every other day, sometimes every day...depends on whether or not I'm also reading a physical book at that time. I have had no problems (touch wood) with this one so far and it goes everywhere with me. So why did I just buy Kindle #4 / my 3rd Kindle Fire, if I own 2 already and one of them is working perfectly. Well, for one thing, I'm kind of wondering if the power issue (that I still have yet to bother to get anyone to look at) is one of those built-in obsolescence mechanics ("It's not a bug, it's a feature, I promise you, bro") that are designed to limit the life of the machine and thus implore the user to buy another one. And because these things are always reduced down on Black Friday, that's when I buy them. I picked this one up for £39.99 (which includes adverts, but I swear to god, I couldn't even tell you what any of them are for, I pay so little heed to adverts, which is why I never know about what films are recently released or what the new McDonald's weird menu is this week). Taking a tenner off the price just to feed me some more government sanctioned, eye-defiling, brain-rot, seems like a fair trade to me. As a denizen of the dissident right, I'm not particularly prone to being radicalised by whatever the state is rolling out in accordance with big business (which is the bare bones of fascism - and I mean actual fascism: the philosophy codified by Gentile and Mussolini...the state as a sacred cow that is completely up-front about its totalitarianism. But I digress...) I'm also one of those weirdoes who doesn't have a phone on them everywhere they go and I try to pay for all goods purchased locally, using cash. I'd love to say I'm a luddite, but I now own 4 Kindles / 3 Kindle Fires...so...um...yeah. I've just booted up the new one and I can't tell if it's because it has no case yet, or if it really is more ergonomically engineered. New things do project a sense of their being "better" but it's not that. Three Kindle Fires in and I think I've lost my initial "wow, look at the shiny-shiny" reaction to buying yet another one. My logic is flawless (even if my actioning of tasks that may or may not resuscitate Kindle Fire #1, is so far beyond the realms of reality, it's getting ridiculous. - I truly am putting the "tard" into tardy) and if all goes well, I will be utilising all of the Kindles (let's not forget ye olde KK3!) If fixed, I will split my books into fiction and non-fiction, putting all of those books into KF #1 & KF #2. The latest addition will be used for the Kindle Unlimited books I like to pick up, 10 at a time, especially when they end up being a decently graphic and violent police procedural / crime fiction series. I will likely keep the other 2 Kindle Fires offline and only move books around via USB, to and from my laptop. The Kindle Keyboard 3 will always be my favourite one as it just met all the needs of a reader. The Kindle Fires are small tablets with a reading app on them. I have no qualms with the reading apps used or the dictionaries I can choose to install to work in tangent with them. But they are designed to do a lot more, hence their being heavier than the KK3 and more prone to eye irritation when not using the dark-mode options. I am starting to see the battery issues with it now, but having read some Reddit forum posts about this exact issue, I'm apparently going to find it relatively easy to procure a new battery (has the iPhone / Apple's attack on a customer's "right to repair" not obliterated this possibility yet? Please don't tell this me something I have to go and cry to Louis Rossman about - absolutely zero shade to Rossman, he's an absolute boss and I love a person with principles, who also adheres to the codes inherent in "malicious compliance" lol). Being as the other half used to be an electrician and has been tinkering with motherboards ever since he learned that they weren't just another word for spaceship, he will endeavour to change said battery, if I can indeed get my hands on a few. Because I mean it when I say I love that KK3 and having it all set up just with the classics, would be blissfully perfect. So, why am I telling you all this? Because it's a Saturday afternoon, I'm sitting cosily on the sofa and I've got all the time in the world to chat about my somewhat excessive Kindle collection. So, what do I like about these 7" Kindle Fires so much that I have now bought 3 of them? Well, they're reasonably cheap (especially when we're buying them on Black Friday) so for anyone looking for an eReader that also gives them internet access and the ability to install apps like X, Pinterest, Instagram...that sort of stuff, it's kind of a no-brainer. Is it as high-powered or useful as a bigger iPad? No, but that's not what this is for. It's mainly for reading, updating a bit of social media, and constantly scouring Amazon for deals on protein bars (okay, maybe that last one was just me). It's reasonably lightweight, easy to use, can be set up however you want your screen to look (dark-mode, blue-shade, regular) and you can alter your choice of font, size, margin widths etc...all so that you can get decent approximation of what it would be like to read a book, exactly as you'd want it to be. Things I don't like: well, I know it's pretty trivial but I was gutted to find that I could only get this 3rd Kindle Fire, with a pink coloured back panel. I was hoping for black because all my other ones are also black and I will never stop being an emo, for as long as I live (Jared Leto in the music video for 'The Kill' will never stop being hot to me). Is it a deal-breaker? Well, obviously not, because I still bought the damn thing, but I'm guessing that this is something more to with demand outsourcing supply as so many people jumped to get one of these during the Black Friday Week? I dislike that the power button has been moved from the top right of the edge, to the top left hand corner. Umm...why? Bit weird. Still going to take me a while to reprogramme the old muscle memory and get around to being able to operate this one on autopilot too. I'm guessing some techie person will have an answer that makes it sound as though the new kit under the hood was so jam packed that they almost couldn't fit a button in to turn the damn thing on and off, so we'd have to develop telekinesis just to crack open the whole thing and somehow infuse the battery with energy ourselves. How? Um...how about magnets...ey? magnets? How do they work? Doesn't matter. We don't need magnets where we're going....and we're going, to the other side of the top edge panel of buttons, because confusing people makes them more psychologically prone to all the other weird methods of nudging and probing. Worried people make terrible decisions. So if you suddenly find that you've accidentally purchased the the entire back catalogue of 'Twilight' movies and that ridiculously long series 'The Vampire Diaries', all because you got flummoxed not knowing where the on/off switch is...I feel for you, I really do. (It's totally a thing. I read about it. Or maybe heard about it. But it's like, 100% going on. COINTELPRO is alive and well folks!) Alright, this is starting to sound a little bit unhinged so I'm going to go and we can all just pretend that none of this happened and y'all can go buy one of these little Kinde Fire thingies, and everyone will be happy. Seriously though, even at full price it's a decent enough piece of tech. It's easy to use, it solves the very real problem of never being sure which of your books you want to take with you somewhere, because of the sheer size and weight of your luggage. It leads you though a very easy to follow tutorial and is very user friendly. They're comfortable for even small (arthritic) hands, but get one of those foldable covers that stand up on flat surfaces, and you can save your poor hands for a bit. It's also a nice way to just play some music while you're cooking, or for when you're wanting to watch a film that isn't whatever depressing nonsense is being played on flights these days; you just pop in your earbuds,sit back and laugh your way through all 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers. Suddenly the world now seems like a much brighter place. So yeah. Definitely buy one now while the offer is on, if you want to try it out and play around with it, but I'm pretty sure you'll find that you like - or maybe even love - it right from the get-go. But even if the offer is over, it's still a handy piece of kit that's worth having if you like books, want to do the whole tsundoku thing, but don't actually want to break your neck by tripping over the masses of books taking up every possible space in your apartment. Trust me, digital tsundoku is a far safer alternative for us slightly clumsy folk. Oh yeah, rating. I'm giving this a 4/5 because I wish I could strip out more of the bloat ware and I don't like where the power switch is, without looking for it. And sure, these are all first world problems, but like, I'm just trying to be honest with y'all. Solid product. I would be very likely [read absolutely definitely gonna do it] to purchase again from this seller.