Gadgetory

welcome my friends to the first installment of a new series called why the advertiser friendly content are you buying this where we look at the number one best-selling tech product in a given category and try to figure out what the heck and fuss is about let's start with the top-selling tablet on amazon.com the fire seven is priced at a weight really only $40 good god okay well that's probably at least part of the answer but cheap does not equal good value so let's see just why those at least 32,000 people are so freaking pleased with this thing you that's quite big looking for an affordable and reliable VPN service private Internet access encrypts your Internet traffic and uses a safe protected IP subscribe today at the link below so let's take a moment to appreciate how ludicrous it is that Amazon sells these for a mere $40 a regardless of the exact spec this is a complex device that no one person could hope to make in the 1 to 4 hours that it would take to earn one it is a truly amazing time to be alive there is a reason that it's cheap though spec wise the seventh-generation fire 7 from 2017 is pretty comparable to a nexus 7 tablet from 2012 but that doesn't mean that it lacks modern features outright for starters it's got Amazon's AXA assistant built-in which makes it a portable touch and voice remote for your smart home and that's actually about it so why the bestseller spot well the main appeal of any tablet is the size and while this one screen is only a little over an inch bigger than some flagship phones these days it still makes a big difference based on the reviews most people are buying one of these for casual web browsing ebook reading and movie watching and if you view the bargain price tag as a key feature frankly it is what I would describe as suitably adequate for those use cases now if you're a seasoned technophile like me with strong opinions about electronic specs you'll probably hate it at least on first glance I mean you'll be watching videos in standard definition rather than even 720p HD the speaker is probably worse than your phone and it is singular speaker not stereo and even reading on the thing gets fatiguing after a while because it has the same number of pixels as an iPhone 4s but those pixels are spread over twice the area which makes for some blurry letters however let's say that you want an Internet Ingush een on your next trip but you don't want to bring along one of your more premium devices or let's say that you want to you know cheap but surprisingly rugged tablet for the kids or the cat the fire seven is great for that and you can even order a kid proof case to go with it it's even cheap enough to give as a gift to relatives who still have cabinets full of VHS tapes or I mean heck you can even buy several of them for some much-needed peace and quiet no we do still have some grapes first you need to be prepared to shell out some extra cash Ola for a decent microSD card because eight gigs or even the sixteen gig version will fill up pretty darn quickly from apps alone never mind movies second speed isn't exactly the fire seven strong point it performs exactly like you'd expect from something with one quarter of the RAM of most modern phones and a processor that was designed primarily for wearables third while it does have both rear and front mounted cameras ahem they probably should have included a peeler in the box for them because quality wise it's a total potato show I mean point three megapixels what is point three megapixels should we even be measuring that in megapixels or kilo pixels now available with 300 teal pixels even this bottom-of-the-barrel hardware though doesn't fully explain why this thing is so cheap for that we need to look at the software unlike Apple Amazon isn't a hardware company at its core so everything about this device including the non-google off' ID version of android that is running is about driving customers back to other Amazon services that's why your fire 7 is loaded with apps like Prime video Prime photos and prime music that's why you get notifications related to your Amazon orders and that's why by default any way you are forced to download any additional apps from the Amazon App Store instead of the Google Play Store giving Amazon the 30% commission on app sales instead of Google that is how they can afford to sell this thing for so cheap not only are they using objectively cheap internals I mean there are a lot of reviews complaining about fire sevens that stops charging or broke all together shortly after the warranty expired but this ecosystem control is such a powerful motivator that Amazon actually subsidizes every tablet they sell then pushes the price down another $15 with the with special offers version that puts ads on your lockscreen so should you become one of the tens maybe even hundreds of thousands of people who own one or several fire seven tablets it's not amazing our first unit was actually inexplicably missing the a assistant for some reason with Amazon's response being no I don't know I guess trade it in for another one but if you want a basic no-frills or like you know utility tablet for the coffee table and you don't have an extra 20 spot burning a hole in your pocket for the large higher-capacity fire HD 8 it really is a good value freshbooks is the small business accounting software that's built for how you want to work it's a simple way to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster so if you're a small business owner or you're a freelancer it lets you create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds it lets you set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster you can see when a client is seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games once and for all and they've got fully featured apps for iOS and Android so you can take expense tracking and our management with you on the go everywhere you go so go check it out they offer a 30-day free trial over at FreshBooks comm slash tech tips just enter Linus tech tips into how you've heard about us section we're gonna have all that linked below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join I wonder how they name this thing do you think the product group just got together and they were like yeah you know we're gonna make like a tablet but yeah it's gonna be fired they're like oh wow Fire tablet