After more than a decade, Amazon is retiring its budget-friendly Fire tablet line in favor of pricier Alexa-branded models running full Android with Google Play. The cheapest new option starts at $230 — $75 more than the Fire HD 10 it replaces — and the flagship pushes past $550. Better specs and a real app store come at a cost.

After more than a decade, Amazon is retiring its budget-friendly Fire tablet line in favor of pricier Alexa-branded models running full Android with Google Play. The cheapest new option starts at $230 — $75 more than the Fire HD 10 it replaces — and the flagship pushes past $550. Better specs and a real app store come at a cost.

Amazon launched its first Kindle Fire tablet in 2011, and over the years the company has dropped the Kindle name, dabbled in the high-end space, and largely settled on the idea that its devices would compete on price and convenience, rather than speed or a broad app ecosystem. But that could be set to change soon. Last year we learned that Amazon was working on new tablets that could ditch the company's Fire OS software and ship with a new version of Android based on AOSP (Android Open Source Code).

Amazon's Fire Tablets ship with a modified version of Android called Fire OS. That means that while the underlying operating system is based on Android, they have a custom user interface, app store, and other features that are tightly tied to Amazon's apps and services. Folks have been hacking Amazon Fire tablets for years by doing things like installing the Google Play Store, disabling lock screen ads, and installing custom home screen launcher apps. But since Amazon usually locks things down pretty tightly, it's been a while since I've seen any methods for…

Amazon's Fire Tablets are some of the cheapest tablets worth buying, especially if you can get one when it's on sale. But part of the reason Amazon's tablets are priced so competitively is because they ship with a custom version of Android called Fire OS that's tightly integrated with Amazon's app, eBook, music, and video services rather than Google's.

After decades of working with computers, I started to develop some wrist and arm pain a few year ago. So I switched from using whatever random mouse I could find for under $20 to using input devices meant to alleviate wrist pain. And for the past few years I've been happily switching back and forth between a Logitech MX Vertical…

Amazon's Fire tablets offer pretty good bang for the buck if you're just looking at the hardware-to-price ratio. They tend to have decent screens, reasonably good processors, and niche features like... microSD card readers. But they also run a fork of Android called Fire OS that may not be everybody's cup of tea. Fire Toolbox is an unofficial set of utilities for hacking Fire tablets.

PC accessory maker UGREEN already sells a desktop USB charger that delivers up to 300W of total power over four USB-C ports and one USB-A port. But it can't send more than 140W to any single device. Now the company has introduced an upgraded model that offers up to 240W of power to a single device, and up to 500W when you use it to charge multiple devices.

This week a lot of folks have been unwrapping Amazon Fire tablets, setting them up... and figuring out that some of the apps and games you want to run on them aren't available out of the box. Fortunately there are a bunch of ways to make an Amazon tablet more useful. You can sideload applications that aren't available in the Amazon Appstore.

The new Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet that launched in October features the same processor as the previous-generation model. But it has more memory, a higher-resolution rear camera, and support for wireless charging. It's a pretty modest update when it comes to hardware, which probably helps explain why it's already on sale for $55 during the lead-up to Amazon's Black Friday sale…

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