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Amazon might be having a hard time selling enough of its new tablets, with the price of its Kindle Fire HDX slate slashed by £30 to £169.
The offer lasts until 2 January, so if anyone gets you Amazon vouchers for Christmas this might be worth considering. The retail behemoth cut the HDX’s price earlier in December for “one day only” but that turned out to be not entirely accurate.
Why might Amazon be lowering its price? It doesn’t make much money on its Android-based tablets normally, using them as Trojan horses to get you to spend cash on its digital stores. So it’s probably taking a loss at this point.
It could be because of reviews like ours, which said Amazon’s ecosystem is too closed, so its tablets can’t do nearly as much as its competitors. You can buy a Nexus 7 from Google for £30 more — £199 — and it’ll play video from Netflix and the Play Store and off saved files, unlike the Kindle, which is limited to streaming from Lovefilm. Not much good if you’ve got a long flight.
The best thing about it is a genuine bit of innovation called Mayday, which lets you talk face to face with a tech support person at the touch of a button. They see a copy of what’s on your display so they can help you figure out what to do — perfect for technophobic rellies who might otherwise get stuck.
Its screen is lovely, and the hardware is fast, but because Amazon approves all apps there aren’t as many on its app store as on other Android devices. It’s a bit hobbled, really, but if you want it for browsing the Web and reading ebooks it’ll do fine — but £169 is a lot to pay for just that.
Have you bought a Kindle Fire? What do you think of it? What would you rather have under the Christmas tree? Fire up a comment below, or head over to our cut-price Facebook page.
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