I’m running around with dogs and kids today, so I was thinking about doing some smaller quicker posts. Of course, I want them to still be useful, so I’m going to start off on this one.
This may be a today-only deal, but Amazon has a $40 Fire tablet available.
Now it’s obviously not going to be the best tablet out there. The processor is slow and the screen’s resolution is not full HD. There’s only 8GB of memory. That sounds like the worst tablet out there, right? Well it can take a microSD to expand the memory. There’s also front and back cameras. The battery life is decent.
My point is that this tablet can be good for some things. As a parent of a 2 and 3 year old, I often view things through that prism. I am sometimes worried about trusting them with my good tablet, but I have no problems with giving them a $40 tablet and saying, “Have at it.” They don’t know any better to complain about the screen resolution or speed… and hopefully won’t for a few more years.
I often also look at a deal as how much money I’m saving off the normal price. After all, if I can get it for a similar price in a few days, there’s no need to rush in, right?
The price of the tablet is usually $50. So getting it for $40 is only going to save you $10. That said, it is a low-priced product to begin with… and it’s 20% off.
Of course this comes with Amazon’s version of Android. That has it’s pros and cons. For Prime members like myself, it means being able to share a lot of quality content with the kids (Tumbleleaf and Go Diego Go are favorites). The biggest con is being limited to Amazon’s store for apps, but I found the Amazon store to have everything I wanted.
I feel like for $40 it’s hard to go too far wrong with this, right? Let me know in the comments.
Hey LM,
Just throwing out another point of view on the topic of budgeting for these types of things. The $40 is probably one of the cheapest investments considering the amount of time they will redeem in entertainment. I sometimes go to a LAN (Local Area Networking) computer center with my friend, and we can enjoy ourselves for 5 hours at a $10 price point. At $2 an hour, it is cheaper than anything else I can think of aside from going to do something in nature. Even though, I could put that money together to eventually build my own computer and never pay again, considering I do it about twice a month and it gets me out of the house, it is the best bargain around. The reason for why I brought that up, is because of your recent Disney trip. If you calculate the amount of hours in enjoyment your family got from that…it falls incredibly flat compared to the amount of entertainment to price point your kids will get from the tablet. This seems like a no brainer…GREAT DEAL!
That’s a great point Geoff. On the other hand, there’s the gift that keeps giving with creating memories. A Disney commercial came on the other day and my oldest said, “Hey, we did that!”
It might be interesting to try to quantify the value of time spent… or it might just ruin the whole experience ;-).