Technology

Amazon Promotes Fire Tablet for New Year

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Now that the official 2015 holiday shopping season is behind us, we’re going to have to look harder for deals and sale pricing. As if to underscore that, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is promoting its Fire tablets with a heading of “All New,” which was true some months ago and is technically true today.

The $49.99 Fire 7-inch device with Wi-Fi and 8 gigabytes (GB) of memory is the lowest priced device in the Fire arsenal, and Amazon snipes it as its “#1 Best Seller.” The “new” Fire HD8, with an 8-inch HD display, Wi-Fi and 8 GB of memory hit the market last fall and sells for $149.99, and the “new” HD10 with a 10.1-inch screen, Wi-Fi and 16 GB of memory that Amazon introduced at the same time as the HD8 is on offer for $229.99.

Neither new device received a thunderingly positive reception, getting knocked about a bit for the quality of the cameras and the no-better-than-average processor and internal memory.
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What the new devices appear to be best at is immersing consumers in the Amazon ecosystem with ties to Amazon Prime ($99 a year) and its movie and music catalogs. Amazon wants Fire tablet owners to subscribe to Prime and continues to add features, such as same-day delivery service Prime Now, to sweeten the deal. All in all, it’s a pretty shrewd offer.

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