Day 17: Win an Amazon Fire HD 8 Tablet

[HEXUS]

Four lucky readers will each bag an 8in HD tablet touting 12 hours of battery life.

Read more.

[nar53]

Perfect for the Mrs. Thankyou Hexus

[SmurfZer0]

Seems like a mighty fine tablet

[pastymuncher]

Another cracking prize. Many thanks to Hexus, Arm and Amazon.

[jcho]

Nice, shame you can't root them (yet!).

[g8ina]

Nice, again

[tag75]

Great prizes again and again

[ik9000]

Shouldn't the question say classical elements? Splitting hairs maybe, but you won't find those on the periodic table.

[jnutt]

Cool Hexus

[whatif]

Thanks to Hexus, ARM and Amazon.
Perfect gift to give my 76 year old mum who has been asking for a small tablet she can carry when away on holidays. She loves reading books but hates taking heavy books with her, and her phone is too small and my 10" tab is tooo big for her purse.

[mac173173]

The picture you have in the competition e-mail and on the Facebook page (showing all the prizes) are of the Nabi DreamTab, NOT the Fire tablet. It is a stock photo used in promo's by Nabi. The picture on the full page for the Fire tablet is correct, but the small boxes where you show all the items in the competition is different, the Nabi.
People may get confused and think they are getting the wrong tablet.

[mud_z]

Thanks

[ESQUIER]

bought one for Christmas for my partner works great need one for me now

[markzero]

Got my prize last week, and I love it!

This device is obviously intended mostly for consumption of media, especially Amazon-based, as the interface has tabs/pages for video, audio, books, etc., rather than an Android-type launcher. It works just as well with my DRM-free epubs and mobis as with my previously purchased Kindle books, though the ones I emailed it using the free service showed up in a "documents" app with generic covers. (The covers do show up properly in the Recent tab.) I probably should just use the card slot, but as some indie bookstores online let you email to Kindle, it's handy. I have a Prime subscription, and streaming those audio and video apps worked great, with no stuttering. Official apps for services like Netflix, Spotify and Pandora are in the store, too, and work well with their familiar interfaces. I loaded some social media apps on it early on, and my email account, but soon got rid of them -- the notifications were too distracting. I haven't really used the rear camera for much, but I've used one of the downloadable apps to save and edit images of receipts.

Coolest unexpected feature: Alexa. It's long-press activated instead of always on, so it's got a subset of the feature set other devices have, but it's still fun, and I'm not concerned about it always listening. I can push the button while I'm reading a book and ask for the weather or other simple question, and get an overlay I can dismiss without having to reload the page (unlike Google Now on Android). There are some otherwise-unadvertised deals you can get only over Alexa by asking it "what are your deals?" These will instantly order if you accept. I tried this, and after I placed an order I was able to click it and hit cancel, but I didn't see any delay period for cancellation, so be wary. If I have to wake Alexa with a button push I might as well search and compare instead of instant order. But I'll probably use Alexa's wishlist feature to queue up things to go over later. And being able to say, "play some classical music," or "play [my named station] on Pandora" means I'm more likely to just start something on a whim, without app friction distracting me from the book I'm reading.

Special thanks to DR for making sure I got the prize.