New banner appearing today on an Amazon Kindle Fire page Here's the text:
| Father's Day Deals: Up to $40 Off Kindle Fire tablets |
| or $79 Off Amazon Fire TV with Kindle Fire HDX 7" 16GB Bundle |
UPDATE: After Father's day (May 15), the price of the combo Fire TV and 16G Kindle Fire HD 7" tablet is $30 higher than the pre-Father's day sale. It's $279 rather than $249 as of May 16.
The Kindle Fire tablets' sale prices are also ended, returnedback up to the regular pricing.
[The rest below is from the original blog article for the sale as of that day.]
The first deal is for tablets alone and it starts with the 7" HD model and includes the 8.9" HDX.
Prices shown are for models with 'special offers' on the lockscreen and represent models with increasing storage capacity:
* New Kindle Fire HD 7" 2nd Gen -
* Kindle Fire HDX 7" -
* Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" -
* Kindle Fire HD 8.9" 1st Gen (Yr 2012) -
NOTE: The lower-cost HD 7" 2nd Gen tablet shows an 8GB option. DO NOT CHOOSE THAT - especially with only a $10 difference in pricing during the sale. 8 GB is just not enough. You'd be swapping out apps all the time to get space since that 8GB includes system files with barely 5 GB for apps, videos and books.
The Kindle Fire family header showing today
Blog articles with detail on the tablets
KINDLE FIRE HDX/HD Tips:
Overview of New Features
More tips: Things to know
More info: From later reviews
The second deal is for the new Fire TV bundle that includes the 16GB Kindle Fire HDX 7" tablet
Note that this is a $79 savings that involves a $99 FireTv.
Amazon's Fire TV was released in April and is described by Amazon as a "Streaming 1080p media player with voice search, Netflix, [Hulu Plus also], Amazon Prime Instant Video, games, and more."The Fire TV ALONE (not bundled with a tablet) is described in detail on its normal solo product page, but the bundled or combo deal is on its own page and is being called a deal, so the 'bundled' page may not always be available.
You can use any current (Year 2013) Kindle Fire tablet to 'mirror' onto your HDTV (to share with others or just to see it on a large HDTV) anything that's on your tablet screen, whether a movie, tv episode, the web, email, or an app. And, it can be used to "fling" an Amazon Instant Video to the HDTV where it is run via Amazon's Cloud, freeing up your tablet so you can do other things with it -- whether web browsing or using it to use the X-Ray features with the video being shown to see (without interrupting the TV picture) who is in the current scene, what the music is, lyrics for it, etc. The display is beautiful, and Amazon built this with faster specs than found on the other streaming video boxes currently and added more capable game-playing capability as well, including multi-player, with the optional game controller(s).
Blog articles with detail on Amazon's Fire TV
FIRE TV
Intro, Tips, More
When the bundled deal was offered briefly a week or so ago, there were complaints that people who put the deal in their carts found that the deal was gone before they could complete the purchase. It IS a very good deal.
ONE caveat: For the Kindle Fire tablets, I tend to recommend the 32GB model, as people tend to get more and more apps, and some are sophisticated games, which take a lot of storage space.
Amazon is bundling only the 16GB model of the 7" HDX tablet, which means that those who are heavy app collectors or those who download a lot of videos onto the tablet will have to, from time to time, remove an app from the device, leaving it in their Cloud areas for download when needed and another app has been swapped out to the cloud if the Fire TV user has filled the space.
But that's what the Cloud (Amazon's server space for our content) is for. However people should be aware this bundling is done only with the 16 Gig tabletel and they'd need to watch current storage apace more.
TV
Check often: Temporarily-free recently published Kindle books
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers. Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.
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I was going to complain that Fire TV does not have a Kindle app (I still think Amazon should do one). But then I remembered that HDX will do display mirroring, so it seems that would be a workaround, if you happen to have both devices. What puzzles me is that I can't find a YouTube video (or even a promotional video on Amazon) that demonstrates this feature in action (after all this time). Or maybe I'm not using the right search terms..
ReplyDeleteTom, yes -- Mirroring your HDX on the HDTV will let you use things like HBO Go (and any other app which is not ready for FireTV specifically yet) on the TV, thanks to Fire TV's very effective mirroring (no delay that I can see at all). I wouldn't want to read a book on the large TV but it's a great way to share magazines. I haven't searched youtube but am pretty sure I ran across some videos. I think lifehacker has a really good photo-set on how it's done and what it looks like.
DeleteI actually did a fairly large photo-set of my own Mirroring and Flinging to show how they differ and what each actually does and fell behind and never did make a blog article for that -- but I still have the photo set. I probably should upload that but it takes time to choose and then put them where people can see the large versions.
The Mirroring is extremely easy to do though. Flinging works only for Amazon's own instant video but I found that the prompts on the videos made it fairly intuitive once someone has the devices. However, many probably wonder what the differences are between the Roku and Apple's boxes. (Speed for one thing, but XRay capability is huge for me.) Roku has tons more 'channels' (most less known) but under HuluPlus, if you have it, there are just tons of unusual channels available. It's been fun to see Amazon getting the voice search (which is just excellent) working with Hulu Plus content now while Netflix seems reluctant to make a deal for that.
The screen savers are the most gorgeous, hypnotic ones I've seen. My favorite app is Frequency, but I think Amazon may find it detracts from looking for other content.