Why You Can Trust CNET The Amazon Fire 7 tablet is on sale for $40 (Update: Expired)
This recent inductee into the Cheapskate Hall of Fame was already a steal at $50.
Consider this my love-letter to Amazon's entry-level tablet.
As regular Cheapskate readers know, Amazon gear goes on sale all the time. The Fire 7 tablet, for example, has been discounted on no fewer than seven occasions in the past 12 months. So this deal isn't super-special.
Except, in a way, it is. The Fire 7 was among the first inductees into the new Cheapskate Hall of Fame, and that was based on its regular, $50 price tag. Now that it's on sale again, I wanted to expand on what makes it such an incredible deal.
Put simply, it's a full-featured tablet for $40. Think about that for a second. The original Kindle e-reader cost $400. The first iPad: $500. These were big, clunky, limited devices; the Fire 7 is thin, light and powerful. Not powerful in terms of processing, though its 1.3GHz quad-core CPU can handle most tasks well enough; no, I mean powerful in its breadth of capability.
It's an e-reader, sure, but also a video player, music player, game console, education tool, virtual assistant (Alexa's on board, natch), digital camera, video camera, web browser, Zoom station and more.
Your $40 buys you only 16GB of onboard storage, but that's easily (and cheaply) expanded up to 512GB (!) with microSD cards. Remind me again which iPads support memory expansion? Right: none of them.
Granted, the Fire 7 is best paired with an Amazon Prime subscription, which would represent a considerable added expense if you bought it just to go with the tablet. But most of us buy it for the shipping and streaming; the Fire 7 is simply another delivery vehicle for the latter.
Some might quibble with the screen, which at 1,024x600 pixels isn't razor-sharp. Some might argue that a 6-inch phone in your pocket obviates the need for a 7-inch tablet anywhere.
Fair points, both. And I'll throw in the existence of the Fire HD 8, which for $25 more (based on the current sale price of $65) gives you a bigger, higher-resolution screen, a faster processor, dual speakers, a USB-C port and twice the storage. It's the smarter buy, no question.
But viewed in a vacuum, the Fire 7 for $40 is an utterly amazing deal. It fully deserves its Hall of Fame entry.
Your thoughts?
Read more: CNET's Amazon Fire 7 tablet review
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