Amazon has updated the 7-inch Fire Tablet to be the “2022 12th generation”version. The big news this year is that Amazon is finally moving to USB-C, which is hard to come by at this discounted price tier. About this price: The Fire 7 is $74.99 without ads on the lock screen, or $59.99 if you want to put up with ads.
For SoC we have MediaTek MT8168V. It is a 12nm chip with four ARM Cortex A53 cores running at 2GHz and an ARM Mali G52. There’s a 7-inch 1024×600 LCD, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage (or $20 more for 32GB), and a 3,750mAh battery that Amazon says lasts “10 hours.”There is a microSD slot, a headphone jack, and support for Wi-Fi 5 (it’s 802.11ac). Technically, the Fire 7 has front and rear cameras, but 2MP each and “no autofocus “they can be useless. There is no GPS or NFC, but the tablet comes with a 5W USB-C charger.
The 2022 Fire 7 also marks the launch of Amazon’s “Fire OS 8”. It’s a fork of Android 11 that doesn’t seem to be much different from the regular codebase, but it doesn’t have any Google apps or services. Amazon promises four years of security updates, even at this ultra-low price.
For $109.99, there is also a “Children’s”version that uses the same hardware and embeds it in a colorful 1.1″thick “Child Protective Case”designed for kids ages 3 to 7. It’s a huge price increase over the regular version, but it’s ad-free and comes with a two-year “worry-free guarantee”. Amazon says, “If it breaks, return it and we’ll replace it for free.”It also comes with an annual Amazon Kids+ subscription and parental controls.
Both tablets are available for pre-order now, with shipments starting June 29th.
