The easiest way is to browse to this article from the Silk browser on your Fire and just tap the links. It’s apparently been possible to do this for about the last year or so-since Fire OS 5 came out the current crop of Fires run 5.4.0.0-but given that I haven’t tinkered with my Fire much lately, I hadn’t noticed.Īll you need to do is go into the Settings -> Security panel and enable the “Apps from Unknown Sources” option, then download and install the following four software packages in this order: Perhaps the biggest surprise I got when I was fiddling around with starting up the new tablet is the discovery that it is no longer necessary to download obscure driver packages and run complicated shell-mode scripts in order to sneak Google Services and the Google Play Store onto the Fire. But unlike all the shoddy Chinese devices out there, these cheap tablets are not poorly made. Instead of sinking a bundle into swanky, polished packaging to make you feel better about the huge amount of money you just sank into your new device, Amazon goes in the opposite direction and makes its packaging emphasize these tablets as a cheap commodity you can just open right up and start using in about ten minutes-so you feel good about all the money you didn’t spend on them. The thought struck me as I was unboxing the HD 8 that Amazon has very cleverly managed to “demystify” tablets as high-end expensive hardware. Having such lousy ones is a way to save some money, at the least. (I can shoot in 4K video that I have no other way to display in 4K than on the same phone with which I shot it!) But then, if the Fire is mainly meant for consuming digital media, I suppose it’s praiseworthy that it even has any cameras at all. My phone has a 12 megapixel camera on the back, and an 8 MP camera on the front face, both of which are better than any point-and-shoot I’ve ever owned. They might be sufficient for video conferencing or taking quick snapshots, but they’re basically the same cameras as the cheaper 7 has. The built-in 0.3 MP and 2 MP cameras aren’t anything to write home about. As far as size goes, it’s the biggest mobile device screen I’ve owned apart from my iPads, and videos do look pretty good on it. And for all that, the screen really isn’t bad. If I don’t compare it to higher-end devices, it’s really quite amazing that for $55 I can get an Internet-connected device that can portably show videos in significantly better resolution than the 640 x 480 TVs I grew up with. Even my old Nexus 7 tablet was 1080p.īut those are much more expensive devices. But it’s not terribly “high definition” by comparison to my 6″ Google Nexus smartphone, which has a 4K 2560 x 1440 518 ppi screen with 3.6 times as many total pixels. The most noticeable differences include stereo speakers instead of one single speaker (though they’re not very loud) and a 1280 x 800 189 pixels-per-inch screen where the x 600 and 171 ppi.Īmazon calls this screen “high definition,” which I suppose it technically is-it can show videos in 720p HD, after all. Less visible changes include a better processor, more RAM, and a 64-bit rather than 32-bit architecture. Hardware: A Few Improvementsįeature-wise, the HD 8 is very similar to the 7, but with a number of improvements due to its newer generation (7th generation, where my old 7 is 5th) and higher price point. However, one of the biggest irritations has largely gone by the wayside: it’s a lot easier to add Google Play now. It still has the weird divide of separating the Kindle ebook reader into separate apps: “Kindle” for Amazon-purchased ebooks and “Documents” for sideloaded documents. The “Mail” client is much improved, but still not what I’d have picked as my primary-use conduit to my Gmail. Not a whole lot has changed in the user interface from the first $50 Fire I bought a couple of years ago, and it still has a number of the same minor irritations and nice touches I remarked on for that earlier Fire. Less than 24 hours later, it arrived on my porch, at no extra charge for the speedy delivery. Sunday night, I decided to order one of the 16 GB Fire HD 8 models on sale this week from Amazon. Sometimes it’s really pretty nice living in a city that also hosts a major Amazon distribution center.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |