Amazon Fire 10 HD
Picked up one of these for $100 during the Black Friday weekend sale – I cracked the screen of my Xperia Tablet Z again, and this costed less than the last time I had to replace the screen. So far:
- Side-loading the Play Store works well – most apps are pretty straightforward, it is actually Google’s apps that are the least well-behaved. I had to give up on Gmail and Inbox.
- Performance is markedly improved over the Xperia Tablet.
- Replacing the launcher makes it look and feel quite like a pretty ordinary Android tablet.
- For some reason Amazon did away with the battery life graphs, but maybe that’s because the battery is only okay.
My old tablet is not completely unusable – about a third of the display is non-responsive, but it does auto-rotate so I just need to flip it to touch any specific part. Currently it’s mainly a fancy bedside clock – right now it’s mainly on the Timely app’s clock mode.