Maximizing Your Prime Day Savings: Should You Invest in an Amazon Fire Tablet?

Key Takeaways

Amazon Fire Tablets are affordable but have sacrifices in performance due to minimal RAM and processor power.
The Amazon Appstore has most top apps but lacks some popular ones, making it suitable for basic browsing and media consumption.
While Fire Tablets lack Google apps, installing the Play Store can be cumbersome, making it a better fit for media consumption.

The low cost of Amazon Fire Tablets always sounds a little too good to be true, but that’s especially the case on Prime Day —when they drop even lower. The big question is, are these tablets good enough to be worth your time, even when it seems like you’d be foolish not to buy one?

You Get What You Pay For

This probably goes without saying, but Amazon doesn’t make Fire Tablets so affordable out of the goodness of their hearts. The Fire HD 8 is priced at $49.99 for Prime Day (normally $99.99). That’s an 8-inch display, 32GB of storage, and 2GB of RAM for less than dinner and drinks for two at a nice restaurant. But there’s a reason for that.

For starters, you have to deal with ads on the lock screen to snag that low price. Don’t feel like seeing a giant promo for The Boys every time you want to use your tablet? The price jumps up to $114.99 for the ad-free version . The main sacrifice, however, is usually performance. 2GB of RAM and a nondescript processor isn’t exactly going to light the world on fire.

However, Fire Tablets have gotten considerably better over time. The Fire HD 10 2023 , for example, has a big 10-inch, 1080p display, an Arm Cortex-A76 processor, a huge battery, and still has a microSD slot for expandable storage. The similarly sized iPad 10th generation costs _nearly $300 more—_you’re getting a lot of tablet for $75.

The Amazon Appstore is Mostly Fine

What about apps? That’s mostly what you’ll be doing on a Fire Tablet, right? The first truth is the Amazon Appstore is not as good as the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. The second truth is that’s probably fine for your needs.

When you look at the top charts in the Play Store, the vast majority of those apps are indeed available in the Amazon Appstore. Big name apps like WhatsApp, Netflix, Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Kindle, and more are available on Fire Tablets. The situation is even better if you’re looking for apps and games for kids.

Some of the apps you might miss include Telegram, Gmail, Snapchat, third-party browsers, and Google apps. Likely, that’s not a big deal for what you’d want to do with a Fire Tablet. The Amazon Appstore will allow you to stream media and read ebooks to your heart’s content.

Don’t Buy a Fire Tablet for the Play Store

Speaking of Google apps, that’s probably the biggest downside of Fire Tablets. YouTube is available in the Amazon Appstore, but that’s it—no Gmail, Chrome, Google Drive, etc. However, it’s actually pretty easy to install the Google Play Store on a Fire Tablet . We don’t recommend buying a Fire Tablet if that’s your primary intention, though.

While the process of installing the Play Store on Fire Tablets is relatively easy, it’s also very easy to mess up . You need to follow the instructions closely and pay attention to the specific files you’re required to download. The other problem is that even if you do everything correctly, it can break after Amazon makes the slightest change. Then, you have to do the whole process again.

Fire Tablets can be great devices for a lot of things, but if the Google ecosystem is where you want to live, you should consider a device that comes with the Play Store pre-installed. Walmart’s onn. series of tablets is the best alternative to Fire Tablets in this regard.

Should You Buy a Fire Tablet on Prime Day?

The key when buying a Fire Tablet—on Prime Day or any day—is knowing what you’re getting into . Your expectations will determine your experience. Don’t expect a Fire Tablet to compete with an iPad’s performance or suite of creativity apps.

What you can expect is a solid device for media consumption. You’ll be able to stream the latest season of The Bear, rent Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, read ebooks, watch YouTube videos and TikTok, and browse the web. For all of that, there’s no better bang-for-your-buck deal than a Fire Tablet on Prime Day.

If you’re interested in picking one up, here are the latest models Amazon has discounted for Prime Day:

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Maximizing Your Prime Day Savings: Should You Invest in an Amazon Fire Tablet?