By Brier Dudley
The Seattle Times
Amazon’s Fire tablets keep getting better and cheaper.
At the low end is the new Fire HD 6 tablet, which the company is selling for $99, or $114 for a version that doesn’t display ads on its lock screen.
With a 6-inch diagonal screen, quad-core processor and a polished interface that Amazon built on top of Android, the HD 6 might be a nice option for people who use Amazon.com services and want a pocket-size tablet.
The Wi-Fi-only tablets do the basics just fine — browsing, email, video playback, e-book reading and mobile gaming — but low prices are their big selling point.
With the HD 6 and its big brother — the 7-inch HD 7, which starts at $139 or $154 without ads — Amazon is offering a refined device for the same price as the off-brand, underpowered Android tablets gathering dust at discount stores.
You could think of the HD 6 as a baby iPad, kind of cute, a little chubby and not as capable as the bigger kids it emulates. But this little guy has an uncertain future.
That’s because a flood of new tablets will go on sale over the next few months, including some priced the same, but with more capabilities and fewer restrictions than the “closed garden” Fire tablets.
Tablet prices are falling across the board as sales slow and the market becomes saturated.
Last holiday season, entry-level tablets cost about $150 and nicer ones were $300 and up. This year the entry level is under $100, and primo hardware is in the $200 range.
When this dawns on people, Amazon may have a harder time making its low-end Fire tablets stand out.
At the higher end, Apple is expected to announce a new line of iPads, including models with larger screens. It could also lower the price of its smallest tablet, the 8-inch mini, less than $299.
I’m intrigued by an 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablet that Hewlett-Packard will begin selling in November for $149. Taking a page from Amazon’s early Kindle playbook, HP is giving buyers free 4G wireless service — up to 200 megabits per month for the life of the device.
Samsung has already dropped the price of its lighter, sleeker 7-inch Android tablet to $180. The Galaxy Tab 4 has a better camera, a slot to add a memory card and runs all sorts of apps, not just those vetted by Amazon.
There are so many options it’s hard to keep them straight, and Amazon isn’t helping. On its Fire HD 6 Web page, the company provides a misleading comparison with the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite, a stripped-down version of Samsung’s 2013 model. If anything, it should compare the HD 7 to the Galaxy Tab 4.
Then there’s the rise of phones with 6-inch screens that may overshadow the HD 6. These jumbo phones are taking off overseas and may soon account for half of all smartphone sales. But for now Americans see them as an amusing oddity, as compact cars were in the 1960s.
This struck me when I put down an iPhone 6 Plus and picked up a Fire HD 6. Their screens are close in size — a half-inch difference — but the HD 6 is thicker, heavier and has a more plastic feel. You can also bend the 6.5-inch HD 6, but it flexes back into shape.
It’s a little silly to compare them; one costs seven times more than the other.
But the HD 6 might be considered by people trying to figure out whether to buy a tablet “and/or” a big phone.
If you’re buying a jumbo phone, you probably won’t need a similarly sized tablet. Amazon apps, including the Kindle reader and media libraries offered with the $99 per year Prime service bundle, run on either device.
Some may opt to continue with a smaller phone and have a tablet for browsing and media consumption. In that case I’d choose a bigger tablet, closer to the size of a magazine, instead of one the size of a small paperback like the HD 6.
But the HD 6 works pretty well on the couch, as an auxiliary display. You can select and start a movie on the tablet and then “fling” it to a TV for big-screen playback if you have a compatible set-top box. Then the tablet works as a remote and displays details from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) about the film and actors.
This worked like a charm with a Sony PlayStation 4. But the movie buffered and paused when I connected to a Fire TV device — the same movie, at the same time and place. Perhaps it was updating itself.
Battery life on the HD 6 is billed as 8 hours. I found it ran for several days when used sporadically, including sessions with the Kindle reading app, movie playback, gaming and browsing.
It is remarkable that you can get such a nice handheld computer for $99. If prices keep falling, Amazon will be giving these away to Prime subscribers a year from now.
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