Amazon has just announced a new tablet, the Fire HD 8 Readers edition. This new device will give you a solid e-reading experience, thanks to Blue Shade technology. It is available for pre-order right now and will be shipping out December 9th 2015 for 249.99.
The Fire HD 8 Readers edition features an 8 inch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 HD. Underneath the hood is a 1.5 GHZ quad-core processor, a rear-facing 5 MP camera and front-facing HD camera. Plus, 8 GB internal storage and a microSD card slot for up to 128 GB of expandable storage.
Amazon is calling this new tablet the Readers Edition because it gives you a free one year subscription to Kindle Unlimited. There are over 1 million titles available and unlimited access to thousands of audiobooks. You can read a number of top books, including The Man in the High Castle, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the Wayward Pines trilogy, the entire Harry Potter series, and many more. The service regularly costs $9.99 per month, and provides tremendous value, saving you about $120 for the first year.
Fire HD 8 Reader’s Edition comes with a limited edition, rustic brown leather case that gives the look and feel of a real book cover and protects the tablet from accidental scratches. The protective case opens like a book and folds flat for comfortable one-handed reading or can stand Fire HD in landscape or portrait orientation so that you can enjoy your content hands-free.
The Fire HD 8 Readers Edition will make sense for people who want to participate in Amazons expansive ecosystem and get a lot of value for their money. The free one year subscription to the Kindle Unlimited program will likely be the deal clincher for most people, although the free Audible subscription for 30 days is strangely compelling too. This device may not ship millions of units like the 7 inch $50 Fire did, but it should be appealing to customers in a number of countries.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
