Our family has gone through two of these tablets and both of them had charging ports that broke. The connector would become very loose and eventually we couldn’t charge them at all. I was hoping the first was just a fluke, but even after Amazon repaired the second one the same problem cropped up again about 5 months later. I was monitoring my son’s usage and he wasn’t being overly aggressive with it or anything. Just poor build quality I guess.
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We keep a few of these around the house as cheap gaming/reading/video tablets for the kids, and yeah, their lifespan is nothing to write home about. We’ve got 1st and 2nd generation iPads that still work 8, 9 years later. But the Fire tablets usually crap out (or just out and out break) in under 2 years.
Really? I can’t read the bbs on my ipad3. Most of the time, I’ve been using it to play endless games of pandemic. It would make a great pdf reader, but transferring a simple pdf from my imac to my ipad is a hit or miss proposition. I need an app I can drag to “put this on my ipad, and do it NOW. app”
Cyanogenmod is discontinued though, you want LineageOS but there don’t appear to be any official builds for amazon tablets. I’m sure some have managed to get a version working on a fire tablet but it’ll be even more of a crapshoot than usual.
Oh, don’t misunderstand. They’re old, slow, and haven’t been eligible for software updates for several years–they’'re extremely outdated devices. But physically, they still work. No pieces have fallen off, no ports have stopped working, no screens have fritzed out. They even hold a decent (though not great) battery charge. They’re well-built pieces of kit.
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Thanks. It seems not worth the hassle. I am getting too old to waste time mucking around with things that kinda sorta work.
It’s not that the Kindle Fire is a bad tablet. I’ve enjoyed mine, and I still use it. I love reading my e-books on a larger screen, instead of using the app on my phone. (I don’t even use the app any more; I disabled it yesterday to make more room in phone storage.) And the price point can’t be beat, especially if you can pile on gift certificates or take advantage of a promotion to lower the cost. But there are tradeoffs. The basic Fire just doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other models in the line, let alone more advanced tablets. And unless you’re extremely tech-savvy, you get locked into the Amazon ecosystem, which is limited by design.
If you do want a basic tablet/e-reader, the Fire is a decent choice. I don’t regret getting mine. But it won’t fit everyone’s needs.
Yeah as a pure media consumption device, particularly for Amazon’s media consumption options it works purty good, and the 7 is just about the cheapest way to get that.
Its just not the ultra cheap general purpose tablet people sometimes pitch it as. And though rooting it can turn it into that, and is mostly possible, doing it is kind of a hassle.
Mine makes a damn fine reader for a Marvel Unlimited subscription. If the app ran better on FireOS, and there weren’t so many damn sales pitches built in the thing I wouldn’t still be looking into it. Did have to side load the play store to get the Marvel app on there, but that’s trivial even if you do it manually. No different than sideloading any app on any Android device. Its just sometimes you have to re-do it.
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I have an 8" HD.
I wasn’t able to get ROOT but with ADB (Android Debug Bridge) and a PC, I was able to rip out ALL of the bloatware, install Google Play Store, and change the Homescreen / Launcher to use Nova Launcher.
The thing to do once all of that is accomplished, is to make sure it CANNOT update itself, otherwise all that work is wasted…
…but now, I have a wonderful little android tablet that is 98% Amazon free, except for the things I allowed to stay. 
So even without ROOT, it CAN be a good little tool, if you are willing to take the time…Good luck out there!
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Last year my sister gave me her 1st generation iPad (I think it was first gen) and it was top of the line when new, I think 64megs of storage. But I found I coukdn’t use it at sime desired sites because the software was old and couldn’t be updated.
I’ve always lived with older hardware, but this was limited because Apple stopped upfates. And if I buy something used for $20 I don’t lose much if I can’t use it, but this iPad seems like such a waste since I know she spent good money on it.
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The way to handle Apple hardware is to resell it before it gets too old, because Apple stuff retains a crazy amount of value relative to other techjunk – but only in the first few years, then it falls off a cliff like everything else.
Thanks for the responses. I really need it only to clearly display PDFs of music and lyrics, and to be quick to scroll and zoom them. It seems that most of my cronies have already ditched paper for them new-fangled tablets.
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My Fire handles PDFs just fine, and I can scroll and zoom in them. If you don’t want to use the Kindle program itself, there are other reader apps available.
I love the iPad hardware, but I won’t use one as my daily tablet because I can’t install an ad blocker. Instead, I use a $400 Huawei MediaPad SHT-AL09 running Android 9 and AdGuard so I’m not pestered by animated ads in apps like the New York Times and Washington Post.
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