As Amazon offers one-day price-cut on its popular 9-inch Kindle Fire tablet, here are the pros and cons
As its Gold Box daily deal, Amazon is selling the refurbished 9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet at $129 for the model with 16 gigabytes of storage. New, this tablet sells for $269. Refurbished, it normally sells for $199. This particular model also comes with Amazon’s “special offers,” which are basically ads that show on the tablet’s lock screen and can be removed for an additional $15. And though it comes with a USB charging cable, you’ll have to supply your own wall plug or resort to charging it from the USB port on your computer.
Though this is a refurbished model, Amazon says it’s “certified to work and look like new” and carries the same one-year warranty as new models. That’s similar to a tactic used by Apple: While many refurbished tech products carry truncated warranties — often 90 days — Apple goes with the same one-year warranty on its refurbished products that it applies to new products in order to make people feel better about buying refurbished gear.
While saving $140 over new models is a good deal, it might be a sign that Amazon is attempting to clear out inventory in order to make way for new Kindle Fire tablets to be rolled for the holidays, if not sooner. It’s been more than a year since this particular model came out.
In his review of the 7-inch model, my colleague Harry McCracken found the tablet to be a bit rough around the edges at first, though many of his quibbles eventually got addressed via software updates. He concluded that if you consume a lot of Amazon content (music, TV shows, movies, e-books), then these tablets aren’t a bad choice. My other colleague, Jared Newman, lamented the tablet’s lack of apps. It’s got a limited selection of the same or similar apps you’d find for Android tablets, curated by Amazon to keep the selections manageable. That keeps an overwhelming amount of sub-par apps out of Amazon’s app store, but it means that you don’t get the same broad array of apps you’d find with a standard Android tablet or an iPad.
Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ Tablet (Certified Refurbished) [Amazon]
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