DIGILAND 7-INCH TABLET

About four years ago I bought an 11-inch Asus tablet. I used it mostly for reading, eBooks borrowed from the public library and kindle books. Occasionally I would check my e-mail, the news or weather, or google something, but it was mostly a reader. I loved it and read dozens of books on it each year. In the last year, however, it began to get very buggy, so I decided to get a new tablet. I wanted to get a good one, so I considered getting an iPad mini, maybe a refurbished one. (Money is a consideration for me.)

A refurbished iPad mini was going to cost at least a couple of hundred dollars, so I was intrigued when I started reading about the Kindle Fire 7. They were available at Best Buy for $50. I had a $25 gift certificate for Best Buy, so I could get the tablet for just $25 more.

Once I started setting it up, I realized it didn’t seem like a dedicated kindle and more like an android tablet, which in fact it was. It took me only a half an hour to set it up because Google had all my info stored from the old tablet.

I was amazed at how easy it was to use and how well it worked. Very quickly I was reading books I had downloaded from the public library as well as kindle books that I had in my kindle library. One thing that surprised me was that kindle software did not come with the tablet, but it was easy to download it from the Play Store.

I liked it so well that I told a lot of people I know what a great buy it was, a wonderful

7-inch tablet for only $50. At least one person bought a Kindle Fire 7 based on my recommendation. He had some trouble setting his tablet up and asked me to help him. I noticed that his tablet was a little different from mine. For one thing, the power button was in a different place. I thought maybe it was just a different version of the Kindle Fire, but he had bought it was the same place I bought mine, Best Buy, and the same price: $49.99. I also noticed that although he had the Amazon store on his tablet, he didn’t have the Google play store. I told him (perhaps incorrectly) that once he got his tablet set up, he would be able to download from the play store.

I still thought I had a Kindle Fire, and I liked it so well that I decided to write a review of it. As I went on the internet to check some stats, I realized that my tablet was not a kindle but a Digiland android, even though Best Buy told me it was a Kindle Fire. It was the same price and size and very similar in design. It even had the same stats: 8GB (gigabytes) of storage, 1.3 GHz quad core processor, and 2 GB RAM. What all that stuff means is that it has limited storage but a fast processor with enough memory (RAM) to make it perform pretty quickly. They both have WiFi, which allows them to connect wirelessly to the internet. They also both have blue tooth, which allows them to connect wirelessly to keyboards, etc. You can add up to 128GB  of storage to the kindle fire by adding a Micro-SD. There is also a space for a Micro-SD on the Digiland tablet.

 If you run out of storage space on your tablet, you can store up to 5GB on the Amazon cloud free. You can also store up to 15GB on Google Drive. Microsoft Azure also offers free storage space on the cloud.

Both tablets have fair resolution (1024 x 600 pixels). You can download and watch videos on both through such products as Hulu and Netflix. One thing that is different is the operating system. The kindle uses the kindle fire OS 5. The Digiland has android 5.1 (lollipop), which is one of the latest versions of android.

When the first personal computers started coming years ago, I asked people, “What can you do with them?” An answer I often got was, “What you can do is limited only by your imagination.” I never found that answer very satisfactory, but it was true, and it is still true today. Although I see the Kindle Fire 7 or the Android Digiland useful primarily as electronic readers where you might check your email or the news or weather once in a while, these devices are fully functioning computers. You could use them to write a book if you want. You can get an inexpensive blue tooth (wireless) keyboard and download a free word processing program from the Play Store or the Amazon store. Once you get started on your book, you can store it someplace in the cloud.

Let me know when your book is coming out.