The Fire 7 and Fire 7 Kids Edition are Amazon’s most accessible tablets and they remain a decent, trusted option against other products at their respective price levels. Now, 2 years since they were last made over, the company is pushing out another refresh. While not much has changed on paper, some of the tweaks do bring more bang for the same number of bucks.
The biggest change here is that storage options for the Fire 7 have doubled in size to 16GB and 32GB. Again, these are being offered at the same price: $50 and $70 with lock screen ads or $65 and $85 without.
The front-facing camera features one of several other changes: it has come up from VGA resolution to 2MP, making it possible to video chat with friends at 720p. Amazon is also touting a “faster” processor, though the number of cores and the clock speed remain the same with an updated MediaTek unit and Fire OS 6.3, based off of Android 7.1 Nougat. That said, it may have had a part in making Amazon’s digital assistant available hands-free with a “Hey Alexa.” On the other hand, mixed-use battery life is now rated at 7 hours, an hour less than the previous version, so take the pro and con as you will.
The Fire 7 is available this year in Black as well as muted Plum, Sage, and Blue colors — to be honest, we’re kinda missing the punchier blue, yellow, and red colors from 2017, but that’s just us.
The Fire 7 Kids Edition takes the Fire 7 and puts it into into a vibrant kid-proof standing case in Blue, Pink, or Purple. It’s only available with 16GB of internal storage (but again, it has room for a microSD card), but at $99.99, it comes with a bunch of benefits, too: it has a 2-year replacement guarantee for if and when it breaks and a 1-year bundled subscription of Amazon FreeTime Unlimited with access to a library of over 20,000 apps, books, audiobooks, and videos from sources like PBS Kids, Nickelodeon, and Disney. It also comes with parental controls for content and use time.
Both are up for pre-order from today until June 6. Fire 7 pre-order customers can get a $10 credit for Amazon’s app store while Kids Edition reservations will get a free pair of headphones featuring Forky or Bo Peep from Toy Story 4 — a $20 value.
- Buy:
- Fire 7,
- Fire 7 Kids Edition
- Thanks:
- Nogib