Kindle Fire HDX Is a Popular Holiday Tablet Choice: 10 Reasons Why

By Don Reisinger

The Kindle Fire HDX combines a high-quality product with an outstanding price. The 7-inch model starts at just $229 with special offers, while the 8.9-inch version will cost $379. The iPad Air, which is the best competitor to the larger Kindle Fire HDX, starts at $499. In terms of overall value, Amazon is doing a great job of delivering it.

It’s hard to talk about the popularity of the Kindle Fire HDX without acknowledging first how important it was to the company to put the device on its homepage. This time of the year, millions of people are visiting Amazon.com to find products. That Amazon can put the device on its homepage whenever it likes is certainly a leg up on the competition.

Amazon is truly one of the more innovative companies in the tablet space when it comes to software. The company offers a product called Kindle FireTime Unlimited, which costs just $2.99 per month, that allows parents to decide what kind of content their kids can access from the device. It also determines daily access times and parental control levels. It’s a great feature.

Amazon is surprisingly making a push for the enterprise with its Kindle Fire HDX tablet. The device includes support for Microsoft Exchange with ActiveSync and allows for printing from the slate. Perhaps more importantly, the tablet lets users connect to their corporate WiFi networks securely with VPN, and soon will offer data encryption across networks.

The Kindle Fire HDX’s screen has been lauded by nearly every screen reviewer in the field. DisplayMate, a company that evaluates digital screens, revealed in November that not only does the Kindle Fire HDX deliver a better display than the iPad Air, thanks in part to its 339 pixels per inch, but it’s an overall better product than Apple’s display.

Amazon’s Appstore is widely viewed as the third-place marketplace in the mobile space, due mainly to the fact that Apple’s App Store and the Google Play marketplace are so big. But Amazon’s store has been quietly racking up some big titles, allowing users to find just about all of the more popular apps they’d find elsewhere.

Amazon has done a fine job of making the prospect of going from iOS or an Android tablet to a Kindle Fire somewhat simple. Through its cloud services, iOS users can upload their tracks to Amazon’s offering for playing on the Kindle Fire HDX and move whatever books they might have on their Kindle Reader app to the tablet. There’s no missing out in porting to an Amazon product.

Amazon’s FireOS has come a long way. The latest version, known as 3.0 “Mojito,” has improved the user interface, making it easier to find apps, games, books and other content. Amazon has also made FireOS more cloud-friendly, allowing users to quickly transfer content to and from the cloud with a single click. The software might not yet be on the level of iOS, but it’s slowly inching that way.

Looking around the Web, one quickly finds that the tablet has received rave reviews from anyone who has an opinion that matters. From users to tech journalists to major reviewing organizations, the evaluations surrounding the Kindle Fire HDX have been largely glowing. While no one would go so far as to say the Kindle Fire HDX is perfect, they’re just fine admitting it’s one of the best slates out there.

Amazon’s ads promoting the Kindle Fire HDX have been downright stellar. The company is not running from Apple’s iPad, like so many other companies do, but instead is embracing the areas in which it believes it has an advantage. The ads are effective at outlining those improvements, and they ultimately prove one thing: Amazon has what it takes to take on Apple.