Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a great addition to the Fire line and addresses most issues I had with my old Fire. I opted for the 4 GB of ram, my old tablet had 2 GB and recently with ever bloated apps was getting very sluggish. The ability to add SD card storage was missing on my old Fire. The screen is crisp, sharp, and has excellent color. Videos play without hiccups or other issues. Apps load quickly and fly compared to my old tablet, an LG V930. The integration of the Kindle functionality is seamless. So far the battery life is excellent and it charges quickly. I really like this tablet. Now for the cons. There aren't many. One feature I miss is on my old tablets the login screen would appear when you opened the custom case by sensing magnets in the case. This tablet doesn't do this unless I missed a setting. The automatic screen brightness is too aggressive in darkness, I have been tweaking the setting but I am not sure it keeps the adjustment for next time. I can just turn that function off. I have hearing aids that link via Bluetooth, they linked fine initially but later couldn't find them. It's possible that the old tablet had interfered with the but it was also on when it succeeded. I will experiment with this to be sure. These are all fairly minor bugs, especially for a new model on it's first day of release, but the biggest issue isn't in the tablet, it's in Amazon policy. There has been intense competition in the different Android segments. The Fire tablets have been "closed shop” since the early days and users were quick to find ways around this. The Amazon store has a lot of good stuff but it's a subset of what's available.on Google Play. Many of the Google apps that I used daily on my old tablet are missing. Luckily there are posted workarounds that allow you to install Google Play and it works fine. The only app that gave any problems was Pinterest and it was on the Amazon store too so I replaced the Google one with that and it works fine. The takeaway from this is that this app war is over and Google won. Amazon should acknowledge this and pre install both play stores on their devices. I think the logical step for a user is to check the Amazon store first in case the app was modded to run properly on the device, then try the Google store if the app can't be found there. There is a larger community of Android users then there are Fire users. This tablet would be much more attractive to them if they knew they would be able to carry over the apps they love without having to " sneak around to do it". So open it up and I think you will sell a lot more, especially at this price and performance. I would recommend this tablet to anyone looking for a solid machine, just be ready to do some extra work to get some of your old apps. ADDENDUM The screen DOES automatically come on when the case cover is opened, but I had opened it in a dark room and it wasn't bright enough to tell because of the over aggressive screen darkening (since adjusted). If it sits idle for a few hours I often get a message informing me that my Samsung SD card has been removed, but it's still there and working fine. I have my applications on the card with a single exception that doesn't like it and everything runs fine. For now I feel that this is a small bug.