Today (August 17) only, Amazon has put its Fire HD 6 with Special Offers on sale for $30 off the regular price. You can pay $69 to get the 6” version, or $119 to get the ruggedized Kids Edition.
You can use the “Configure and Add to Cart” button on the right side of the screen to double the on-board storage from 8 to 16 GB for $20, or disable the Special Offers for $15 (on the $69 Fire HD 6; the Kids Edition doesn’t have Special Offers). If you buy it with the offers and should discover you find them annoying, you can pay that $15 at any time you own the device to remove them.
That’s a decent price for a media tablet. You can find other Android tablets that cheap, but not ones with the kind of polish you find on a name-brand Amazon device. If I were a little financially better off right now, I’d be tempted to grab one just to try it out.
The one drawback to it is that it’s locked into Amazon’s ecosystem—you can’t buy titles from Google’s app store, just Amazon’s (unless you’re willing to follow some of the tutorials out there to let you sideload), and can’t use any of Google’s applications, such as Gmail, Inbox, Hangouts, or the Google Maps application either (though some of these services can be accessed via the browser or other applications Amazon does offer).
On the other hand, there are probably a lot of Amazon customers who couldn’t care less about that sort of thing unless they’re hooked on titles like Plants vs. Zombies 2, which you still can’t find on Amazon’s store. You can even snag apps from some of Amazon’s competitors, such as Netflix and Hulu. No Nook Reader or Kobo apps, but it does have Overdrive for library e-books as well as some of the generic EPUB readers such as Moon+ or UB.
Update: I previously assumed the sale applied to the 7” version, too, simply because the 6 had the option to click over to the 7” version within it, but hadn’t noticed it also applied to the Kids Edition. Oops! Also, updated to use the new nomenclature. Thanks, Nate.
I have a kindle fire and the email app accesses gmail. The fire has a decent browser and just yesterday I called up google maps and checked out area traffic. It’s a great tablet.
Good point. I’ve tweaked the article a little to clarify that.
The Fire HD 7 is not on sale.
It’s also not the Kindle Fire, but the Fire HD 7. The tablets aren’t called “Kindle Fire” anymore. That stopped when they launched around this time last year.
Whoops! Well-spotted, Nate. Fixed.