Amazon today updated its $49 Fire 7 tablet with more storage and the ability to answer Alexa queries while the screen off. But the relatively low-key updates don't mean you should upgrade your older Fire tablet.
Rather, Amazon is just keeping the low end of its product line up to date. The Fire 7 is Amazon's basic media playing and color reading tablet, popular among families with small kids. Recently, though, a few other $49 Android competitors have popped up—the Nook Tablet 7, for instance, as well as the Lenovo Tab E7, and a whole bunch of off-brand products.
So Amazon is raising its game a bit. The Fire 7 now comes in slightly more muted colors (shown above), with 16GB of storage at $49 rather than 8GB, and it adds an always-on Alexa ability when it's not actively being used. According to the press release, that ability appears to fall short of the Fire HD 8's "Show Mode," though, which turns the 8-inch tablet into an Echo Show with visual responses to Alexa queries. This one is only promising audio.
Amazon also says the 1.3GHz MediaTek processor on board is faster than the previous model's 1.3GHz MediaTek processor. Battery life has dropped from 8 hours to 7 hours because of the always-on Alexa functionality; it's longer when always-on Alexa is turned off.
Otherwise, not much has changed. This is an inexpensive, colorful plastic tablet with a 7-inch, 1,024-by-600 screen, dual-band Wi-Fi, a MicroSD memory card slot, a VGA front-facing camera and 2MP rear camera for video chat, and a mere 1GB of RAM. That last spec, in our experience, has meant frustrating performance issues (not just on this tablet, but on anything with 1GB of RAM) and it's a major reason we more aggressively recommend Amazon's $79 8-inch model, which has 1.5GB of RAM.
Recommended by Our Editors
Amazon will also continue to offer a $99 "kids" version of the tablet, which comes with a two-year no-questions-asked guarantee, a rubbery case and a year's worth of Amazon's FreeTime Unlimited subscription content service. (That's about $70 of accessories and services for a $50 premium over the regular tablet.)
We've historically reviewed the Fire 7 pretty well in part because it doesn't have many ambitions beyond feeding you Amazon content, a job it does decently. More general-purpose cheap tablets are handicapped by the fact that most apps run poorly on devices this inexpensive, but Amazon guides you to (Amazon-run) services which work moderately well.
Basic tablets like this perform important tasks as video players and backseat entertainment devices; with their very low cost, they can be put into the hands of small children without too much worry. Amazon's base model tablet is primarily for consuming Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix streaming content, and there's plenty of that. One thing to note is that YouTube works poorly on Amazon tablets because of arguments between Google and Amazon; considering how toxic YouTube is now, that might actually be a good thing.