Amazon, whose hardware products primarily serve as vessels for consuming its own content offerings, has plenty of incentive to sell you a tablet cheap and then make it as appealing as possible to pay for movies, music, and ebooks. While the idea of a cheap productivity tablet is intriguing, the Fire HD 10 isn’t up for the job. But unless your computing needs are extremely basic, Amazon’s app ecosystem will feel too limiting, and its lack of any Google apps could make it a nonstarter. Perhaps there’s a subset of users for which that proposition holds up. And at $220 for everything, it’s less than half the price you’d pay to buy Apple’s cheapest iPad ($329) and outfit it with a Smart Keyboard ($159).
The implication is that Amazon’s tablet-best known until now as an inexpensive media-consumption device-can help you get some work done too. Last month, Amazon released a new version of its Fire HD 10 tablet, and with it, a new “ Productivity Bundle” that includes a detachable keyboard case and one-year subscription to Microsoft 365, a subscription service that includes Microsoft’s Office apps.