Amazon’s knocking £25 off its Kindle Fire tablets this weekend. That means the retail giant’s Android-based slates now start at just £94 for an 8GB Kindle Fire HD, with the offer ending on Monday 20 January.
It’s £174 for a 16GB Kindle Fire HDX 7-inch — then add £30 to double the storage to 32GB, and the same again to go up to 64GB. I should point out there’s not a huge need for storage on a Kindle Fire because here in the UK you can only stream movies from Lovefilm, not download them.
If you’re after a larger slate for your in-bed movie watching, the 8.9-inch HDX starts at £304 including the discount, adding £40 for each storage upgrade, and the large HD is £154, having already lost £50 in an earlier price drop.
All those prices include ‘special offers’ — ads that appear when you’re not using the device. You can pay an extra £10 to get a model without these marketing intrusions.
To bag your quarter-century discount, just enter the code ‘MAYDAY25’ at the checkout. All Fires qualify for free delivery.
Hold your Fire
Are any of them worth your time? I’d say £94 for the smaller one isn’t bad at all, as long as you’re happy with your movie watching being restricted to Lovefilm and your apps selection not quite as extensive as normal Android (Amazon vets the apps you can download). Specs-wise it’s pretty similar to the £119 Tesco Hudl, which doesn’t suffer those restrictions.
If you’re going to spend more, however, the 16GB Nexus 7 is unbeatable value for £199. You can download movies, there are zillions of apps and its Full HD screen is superb. Apple’s iPad mini edges it for apps, but is far more expensive at £319.
Amazon says the offer celebrates being voted the “number one retailer for customer satisfaction over the Christmas shopping period for the seventh year running” in the ForeSee survey, which was actually released on 18 December — when it slashed £30 off Fires — but whatever. Amazon shaded John Lewis, Apple, M&S and Asda, with Ryanair bottom of the 40 sites measured.
Are you considering a Kindle? Do you think Amazon deserves its customer satisfaction rating? Table your objections down in the comments — and don’t discount our Facebook page.
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