Educate me (Amazon Fire HD)

[BobR]

Woot has this:

Amazon Fire HD 8 Tablet - 2016 Model (Includes Special Offers), 32GB Internal Storage, 8" HD Touchscreen IPS Display, Quad-Core Processor, Dual-Band 802.11n, FireOS 5

on sale for 49.95 right now.

Any good, was thinking for my wife for games, books, and other light stuff. I know nothing about tablets. FWIW, I do NOT have a Prime membership.


bob

[MikeB]

To consume Amazon Media the Fire Tablets are good in my experience. If you don’t have Prime and aren’t likely to get it you can find better Tablets probably for not much more.. The Amazon Tablets are not compatible with a lot of normal Android apps. Sometimes you can get away with side loading but generally you are limited to the apps/games that are on Amazons App Store. You can always do Kindle, Amazon Video, etc on most any Android Tablet so the Fires are more limited vs. other Android Tablets.

[KD5NRH]

Been running one for a while with CyanogenMod.  Makes it pretty much just another Android tablet.

[MillCreek]

The Woot deal is a generation behind: the current Fire HD was released in 2017, and the Woot deal is not that great.  I have both the 2016 and 2017 Fire HD, and I was able to install the Google Play store on both of them in four easy steps.  This enabled me to put on all my Google Play apps.  It makes a great Android tablet, especially when you get them on sale.  The 2017 model will be on sale for Christmas.

[HeroHog]

Been running one for a while with CyanogenMod.  Makes it pretty much just another Android tablet.

Still have the "Green Bar of Loading" I see...
Anyway, THANKS! I'm gonna play with this!  

[HeroHog]

Apparently LineageOS is the new king as support/development ended on CyanogenMod.

https://www.androidauthority.com/cyanogenmod-lineageos-654810/

[KD5NRH]

Apparently LineageOS is the new king as support/development ended on CyanogenMod.

https://www.androidauthority.com/cyanogenmod-lineageos-654810/

Right.  IIRC, at the time the Cyanogen installer was the only one that was pretty well automated for the particular Fire I have.  Haven't checked what it would take to switch since then, because...well...it just works.  

7-8" tablets are sort of limited by their size in terms of what they do well anyway, especially out of WiFi range, so it's mostly an ebook reader for me, with the occasional game (MPuzzle Pro is pretty much the sudoku-like-gamer's ideal app.) or video.  It's not until 10" tablets that I start wanting a keyboard to turn it into a netbook on demand...though I do have a couple OTG adapters laying around because I found a rollup keyboard and a cheap photo easel with a 7" tablet to be a heck of a lot better way to write up stuff on the go than using the on screen keyboard.  If I did it more frequently I'd go the netbook route.

[HeroHog]

Any advice for installing Cyanogen? How tos or any other help in what I need and how to do it?  LineageOS looks like it should work BUT they don't show what package to use and the help is lacking.

[KD5NRH]

Any advice for installing Cyanogen? How tos or any other help in what I need and how to do it?  LineageOS looks like it should work BUT they don't show what package to use and the help is lacking.

IIRC, I just Googled the FireOS version and rooting instructions, and ran across the Cyanogen instructions that way.  Probably worth signing up over at https://forum.xda-developers.com and searching for the right threads there.  Lots of guys there take any bug as a personal challenge when it comes to upgrading cheap stuff.

[HeroHog]

Screw it. Half the files needed, according to the link I was following, were either unavailable or SPAM City and I NOPED RTH out. Mine is the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (jem) 2nd Gen (AKA: Previous Generation) which appears to be the bastard stepchild of the Kindle Fire world.

[KD5NRH]

Mine is the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (jem) 2nd Gen (AKA: Previous Generation) which appears to be the bastard stepchild of the Kindle Fire world.

Often the case, with plenty of platforms.  Likely it can be done, but isn't worth the trouble unless you have a specific goal in mind that can't be cheaply achieved some other way.

[MillCreek]

http://deals.kinja.com/amazon-just-launched-its-final-wave-of-device-deals-an-1821162452?rev=1512911953701

Note that you can get a current-generation Fire HD 8 for $ 49.99 today.