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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 December 2019
Style Name: Fire 7Digital Storage Capacity: 16 GBConfiguration: with AdsColour Name: BlackVerified Purchase
First the good stuff - On Black Friday the 16G version with adverts cost £29.99, i.e., one penny under thirty pounds. I actually went with the 32G version (an extra £10) and opted to remove the adverts (also an extra £10). If you are in the Amazon eco-system with Kindle books, magazines, music, Prime etc. then this is a perfect tablet for consuming those media. The tablet is light in the hand and the perfect size for reading. The specs are not IPad pro (or even IPad) level but that is mostly irrelevant. The screen is fairly low resolution; the audio is Mono only; there's only 1G of ram, but you do get a quad core processor and quite frankly once you're using the tablet you would never know that the specs are poor compared to other tablets (I also have a Fire HD 10 and the Fire 7 seems just as responsive and usable as that). The cameras are basic at 2MP each but they work just fine, and all this for less than the price of an expensive book - what's not to like. Some things to be aware of: 1) The battery life is about 7 hours so if you want to use the tablet all day you'll probably need to be aware of when WiFi is on or not and maybe turn on all the power saving options in the settings menus. 2) I had a lot of problems getting the tablet connected to my WiFi. 1/2 of the problem was the tablet and 1/2 was my router (a BT home hub). If you have the same difficulties here's what caused my issues and the way to fix them. TURN OFF THE BT HOMEHUB SMART SETUP. If a BT Homehub smart setup is ON then the hub will try to help you with new devices when they are first connected by "assisting" with your WiFi credentials. On the Fire 7 this crashed the browser trying to display the HTML page that the hub was serving. I tried for over a day to fix this and even ended up on a half hour phone call to Amazon technical support - it was only by luck that I found a forum post on a similar issue that led me the hub settings that disabled smart setup - then everything worked fine.
For those who want apps that the Amazon app store doesn't have, then load the Google Play store. You'll find lots of videos on YouTube telling you how to do it - you do not need to root the tablet or even reboot it, and both app stores (Amazon and Google Play) exist quite happily side-by-side. This is how you get Firefox, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneNote, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, VLC and lots of other Google Play store goodies such as alternate E-Readers, Music Players, Video Apps etc.). All told it took me less than ten minutes to get the play store up and running and another half an hour to get all my apps downloaded and installed. Amazon will also sell you a case for your new tablet (I bought the official Amazon case for £24.99 but there are many cheaper alternatives) plus a MicroSD card (I bought a 128G SanDisk Ultra card for £12.95) that allows you to carry around an insanely large amount of media.
Summary - A brilliant tablet. For £87.93 I have the tablet in an actual Amazon case and a total of 160G of storage (32G of native storage plus a 128G MicroSD card). Wow!
For those who want apps that the Amazon app store doesn't have, then load the Google Play store. You'll find lots of videos on YouTube telling you how to do it - you do not need to root the tablet or even reboot it, and both app stores (Amazon and Google Play) exist quite happily side-by-side. This is how you get Firefox, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneNote, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, VLC and lots of other Google Play store goodies such as alternate E-Readers, Music Players, Video Apps etc.). All told it took me less than ten minutes to get the play store up and running and another half an hour to get all my apps downloaded and installed. Amazon will also sell you a case for your new tablet (I bought the official Amazon case for £24.99 but there are many cheaper alternatives) plus a MicroSD card (I bought a 128G SanDisk Ultra card for £12.95) that allows you to carry around an insanely large amount of media.
Summary - A brilliant tablet. For £87.93 I have the tablet in an actual Amazon case and a total of 160G of storage (32G of native storage plus a 128G MicroSD card). Wow!
