![]() My broad range of Macs with AirPort and AirPort Extreme stay connected. My old iPhones and iPod touch stay connected. The most frustrating feature of the Fire is that it is the one device in the household most likely to lose its connection to our WiFi network. You can pick up a 32 GB memory card pretty reasonably these days – mine was $13 at Walmart. ![]() It can store music, photos, videos, documents, and some apps on the memory card, but not all apps will run from the memory card under Android 5.1. It has a Micro SD memory card slot that can accept up to 256 GB of memory. ![]() It uses a standard Micro USB connector for charging, the same as most Android devices. In portrait orientation, it fits my hand very comfortably, and it’s pretty light. $50 normally, $30 on Black Friday, $35 on sale maybe a few times a year, and the only drawback is that it shows you an ad every time you turn it on. For Clash of Clans and Euchre 3D, it makes my aging eyes very happy. It’s not Retina, but it is very easy on the eyes with good color. This is akin to Apple leaving behind 32-bit devices with iOS 11 – devices running iOS 10 and earlier will continue to work, but as software progresses to 64-bit only versions, users of 32-bit iDevices will not be able to run the latest version. Google is pushing to have all apps in the Play Store available in 64-bit by 2019 – not that 32-bit apps are going away. Lollipop was the first version of Android to support 64-bit hardware, which is becoming more and more popular – in fact, the other two Fire tablets are 64-bit devices. At present, almost 25% of Android devices connecting to Google are running Android 5.0 or 5.1, so it’s not an uncommon choice. Android 5.1 Lollipop came out in March 2015, so it is almost 3 years old. One thing to bear in mind is that Amazon still ships Fire tablets using Android 5.1 as its core operating system – and then puts its Fire interface and adware features on top of it. Considering the Black Friday price of Fire 7, the iPad mini 3 originally sold for 11 times as much! Then again we’re comparing a device designed for a $50 price point to devices selling for $329 (iPad mini) and up. The iPhone 5 has comparable power, and it’s a dual-core device. Needless to say, it’s disappointing for a quad-core CPU running at 1.3 GHz to perform so poorly.
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