Swipe the slate clean
Be it Amazon or Apple, tablets make for great back-to-school study aids, writes
Kitting the kids out to go back to school is more significant this year than ever. They have a term and a half of lost lessons to make up, so any help they can get in the technology department is going to be welcome. Laptops and tablets have for some time been the most requested aids to studying, but while the range of the former is roughly similar to that of last year, iPads and their rivals have proliferated during the months in between.
Apple invented tablets and its iPad range is second to none. It’s also the most expensive, though, and arguably too valuable a piece of kit to be subjected to the knockabout routine of classroom life.
That makes its newest competitor an attractive proposition. The latest version of Amazon’s Fire HD 8 tablet costs only £90 – around a quarter of the cheapest Apple tablet – but does almost everything an iPad does, if a little more slowly.
Amazon markets its range of Fire tablets as “media devices” rather than educational tools, but they are capable of running exactly the same kind of apps, albeit those developed for the Android operating system rather than Apple’s iOS.
The 2020 Fire HD 8 is said to be 30 per cent faster than its predecessor – which, confusingly, is also called the Fire HD
8 and is still available for £80. You can tell it apart because it has 16 gigabytes of storage instead of a minimum of 32.
With its plastic case, the Fire HD lacks the premium feel of an iPad but it does have front and rear cameras and a half-decent quad-core processor.