My kids pre-ordered tablet 1280x800 HD

My kids pre-ordered tablet 1280x800 HD

 

 

I really love this thing. My kids pre-ordered it for my birthday. Mine is the version without "special offers," because my daughter checked out an older model in store, and found the ads annoying.

So I've been playing with this for a couple of months now. I'm finding the Amazon integration and digital reading really convenient. This is going to save me so much book shelf space! Goodbye endless paperbacks! And I find the 7" screen size is perfect. Much larger would seem clumsy, I think; much smaller and I may as well be reading on my phone. No complaints at all as far as reading goes.

The only things I don't like about this product relate to Amazon's customization of Android. I don't like that I'm basically locked into using Amazon's app store only. You can get apps from 3rd party stores by allowing it in the settings, but you're SOL if you want to use Google Play. I didn't think that would be a problem. But in two months I've already found more than one app I wanted to get that is only available for Android through Google Play. But I probably wouldn't have taken off a star for that. The reason I did only give it four stars is the "carousel." That thing is super annoying. It looks cute at first. At first.

If you're unfamiliar with this feature, instead of a home screen you get a line of large icons that you basically rotate through. It's all of your icons for everything. And it's ordered more or less by the things you used most recently. I say "more or less" because I find things at the front of my carousel for no apparent reason from time to time. Nobody else uses the device, and I didn't use the app. Maybe it updated in the background? No clue. Also, at the front of the carousel are items you have clicked on by accident. And of course the books that you've finished reading are ordered before the ones you haven't yet read. And it's all jumbled together. It's basically a giant mess.

Of course, you can slide down to the screen below and see all of your apps, or you can tap on a heading to go to various other screens (AFAICT only Amazon purchases appear in "books," I've had to go to "documents" to find free books I've gotten elsewhere, and the Amazon book purchases also show up there). But forget customizing anything. No wallpaper, no place to display the icons you want displayed, and Amazon picks out your lock screens (it used to be a single screen, but there are a few that rotate now, none of which are photos of anything I would have chosen myself). Amazon knows better than you do what you want to see and what you want to do.

So yeah. It's super annoying, and it's definitely worth knocking off a star on an otherwise excellent device.

My kids pre-ordered tablet 1280x800 HD