Hacker News Reader

Amazon's most recent line of Kindle Fire tablets are horribly slow products. They sacrificed their hardware in order to make a super cheap tablet (which in my opinion is a mistake because it leads to poor user experience). I'm sure this is an attempt to get a little extra performance from these products.

View on HN

I actually have one of the $50 Fire tablets. Super slow for a tablet, yes, but fast enough to read Kindle books, watch Amazon Prime shows, or listen to music from Amazon. It's slow hardware, but it's just fast enough for its intended purpose.

I haven't poked at the underlying system at all, but I have noticed that giving these cheap tablets a fast SD card considerably improves the performance. It might be memory contention and the tablet using the card for swap, or simply putting applications onto the card is faster than the internal storage. I'm not sure, but it Works For Me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com