Still tied to Amazon's lesser app store which is severely lacking compared to Google Play. Yes, you can get Play Service and apps onto it, but it's annoying and unsupported, so not something you'd want to give to your parents.
Alexa Hands-Free seems to be the big new feature. Even with the screen off, you can use it as an Echo device just by calling out the Alexa wake word. That might make this like a cheaper, more portable Echo Show device... and with more functionality, since it's also a tablet.<p>Unfortunately Alexa Hands-Free is only on the HD 10 unit for now, not the smaller tablets.
How do these compare performance wise to other tablets (like an ipad)? I had one of these a few generations ago, and it was painfully slow. Though I could see at $79 one of the 8" being a great price for travel or watching in bed netflix.
This is really tempting. If Apple hadn't made such great strides in iOS for the iPad over the past three releases I would jump on this in a heartbeat.<p>But I live my life in a combination of the Apple and Google ecosystem and this supports neither.
These tablets, given their price point and availability, seem like fantastic platforms for hacking on. Anyone know why they haven't seen more adoption for that use case?