A capable device that won’t burn a hole in your wallet
The Amazon Fire 7 tablet is cheap. Really cheap. And, let’s face it, with the cost of living shooting through the roof, who has a wad of cash sitting around for an iPad? Maybe it’s time to embrace the budget options. Of course, ‘cheap’ and ‘good value’ are two very different things. The Fire 7 certainly ticks the first box, but how does it fair on the second?
Meet the specifications
For your £60 you get a 7in screen, 16GB of storage, a quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM, and a charging cable. There’s even a wall adapter in the box – a rare luxury these days. You can also get a version with 32GB for an extra £10, but both versions are user-expandable so the lower-capacity model may well suffice.
Amazon has to keep the price down somehow, so as standard the Fire 7 tablet comes included with lock-screen ads. For a fairly small extra outlay, however, you can buy a variant without ads. That means the most expensive configuration you can purchase, with 32GB of storage and no lock-screen ads, is £80.
Just to contextualise, and using the cheapest model of each respective device, you can get one iPad 9th Generation for £319, or five Amazon Fire 7 tablets for the same price. While that may not be a like-for-like comparison, it does help to put into perspective just how cheap this tablet really is.
Straightforward design
The Fire tablet has a simple, inoffensive design that just gets the job done. The front features a 7in display with a webcam, and on the flip side is a soft-touch plastic back emblazoned with an Amazon logo, with a rear-facing camera tucked in the corner.
Around the sides there is a lock button, volume controls, 3.5mm headphone port (something that even the most expensive iPads don’t have), USB-C charging, a mono speaker and SD card slot for expanding the storage. It is available in three finishes: black, rose (pink) or denim (blue).
Amazon’s software is a heavily modified version of Android that resembles the user interface of the Fire TV streaming devices. There are no Google Play services here though, and no Play Store. Instead, you get the Amazon Appstore, which covers basics such as Netflix, Spotify and Disney Plus. Google and Apple apps are nowhere to be found.
Amazon’s mostly useful virtual assistant, Alexa, is baked into the software. You can ask it to open apps, check the weather and play TV shows and movies. It’s the Alexa we all know and tolerate; and overall it’s fairly cohesive with the software experience.
The operating system, however, can be sluggish, obviously handicapped by its modestl
