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.