The thing to remember about Amazon’s new $ 50 Fire tablet is that it’s a $ 50 tablet. It’s not as light or as thin as a tablet that costs five or six times more. The camera isn’t as good, and the screen isn’t as sharp. But it works well as a budget device for the basics — reading, Facebook, video and, of course, shopping on Amazon.
Over the years, Amazon.com Inc. has done a good job of making tablets affordable for the masses. The new Fire tablet is Amazon’s cheapest yet, joining a fall lineup that maxes out at $ 230 ($ 15 more if you want Amazon to remove ads on the lock screen). By contrast, Apple’s iPads start at $ 269, ad-free.
Of course, you get less for $ 50.
The Fire started shipping again Thursday after a limited run quickly sold out, despite these trade-offs:
— THE FEEL: The 7-inch tablet is bulky, about two-thirds as thick as a deck of cards. This runs counter to a trend of gadgets getting thinner and thinner. But this is reasonable for budget devices, as they use older, larger components to cut costs. At 11 ounces, the tablet also feels heavy for a device that size.
— LOWER RESOLUTION: The screen is just short of displaying video in full high definition, otherwise known as 1080p. As Amazon’s HDX tablets and Apple’s “Retina” iPads tout super-sharp displays, the screen on the new Fire feels retro.
Photos and video display fine. Where the lower resolution is most noticeable is with small text. When reading, some of the vertical lines in d’s and l’s look fat. It feels like a typewriter with metal type that hasn’t been cleaned of gunk, forming misshaped letters when some of that gunk hits the ink ribbon. (For our younger readers, typewriters are machines that produce letters on paper,…
