Amazon Fire Tablet (2015) gallery

By Chris Davies/Sept. 17, 2015 8:00 am EST

Priced from an astonishing $49.99, the Amazon Fire Tablet promises none of the compromises cheap slates normally entail. Fronted by a 7-inch 1024 x 600 IPS display, the sub-$50 Fire still manages to pack a 1.3GHz quadcore processor and 1GB of RAM.

That's put to work running Fire OS 5, Amazon's own Android version. The company boasts twice the toughness – tested in a huge tumbling machine – of the iPad mini.

If you want even more resilience, $99.99 gets the Fire Kids Edition. Cladding the 7-inch tablet in a tough impact case, it comes with a year of FreeTime Unlimited and, more valuable perhaps, two years of no-quibble warranty cover.