In July 2019, I purchased the $29 Kindle Fire 7 (9th Generation) during Amazon Prime Week. I honestly just wanted to see what you got for $29. (Actually, I think I paid $39 to have it ad-free, I hate to have ads forced on me when I’ve already paid for a device).
Spoiler: It wasn’t much.
Unlike the Kindle HDX 7″ device that I purchased in 2014, which had a 2560×1600 display and ran fast at the time (and still runs OK to this day), the Kindle Fire 7 purchased last year ran slow as balls — even to web surf — and only had a paltry 1024×600 resolution. Yikes.
I knew that ahead of time though — Amazon never made a Kindle with the HDX resolution after 2014 (even today the best you can get today is 1920×1080), but instead opted for cheaper low-res screens to drive the price down. Even though I knew the resolution would be crap, it looked bad compared to my old HDX (or my phone, or computer monitor, or an iPad, or pretty much anything).
I put it in a drawer and started using my old Kindle HDX again — even though its apps haven’t been updated in 3 or 4 years. (Amazon no longer supports the HDX and their “store” although built on Android, doesn’t use Android apps, but is handicapped to run what are really Kindle apps from 2014). For example, you can’t do Facebook emojis, you can only “Like” something on Facebook, because the app hasn’t updated in so long. In theory it’s possible to install Android apps on a Kindle, but I never got that far and I’m dubious that it would work on this cheapo model.
Flash to 2020 and I decided it was time to upgrade. As much as I liked the HDX, the lack of updated apps was bugging me.
Here’s where it starts to get weird. At first, I thought I’d turn the $29 Kindle in as a trade. But when deciding on a Fire HD 10, the cheapo model didn’t even show up, even though it was in my list of Amazon Devices. Amazon thinks so little of the device that they won’t even credit you for trading it in (my HDX or Fire TV Stick would credit me $20 though).
Maybe, I decided, I could let the Kindle Fire 7 (9th Generation) run an app and sit it at my desk. Something that would automatically update like a weather app, radar, something. Upon entering the App Store, however, every app I tried to download bounced back during installation saying it was not compatible with that device. OK fine, I thought, let’s access YouTube on the web. I was astounded to see (because all of this works fine on my HDX from 2014) that not only would the YouTube app not work, neither would the website (saying it was because the device was running Android 4.0).
Then I started pecking around on the web, and it wasn’t even just YouTube. I couldn’t even use Google’s website. Or CNN. Or NASA. Even some plain webpages on my own site wouldn’t load. The only error was “Web page not available.”
At this point, I started to suspect there was something wrong with the cheapo device, so I decided to factory-reset it. Afterward, it performed the same. No apps would install and almost no websites would load.
I realized that is because you’re not even using the “Silk” web browser (which still works on my HDX) on the Kindle Fire 7 (9th Generation), it’s a more simplified web viewer that is either not capable of reading modern websites, or is failing due to lack of memory on the device – those are my best guesses. I was floored to conclude that Amazon had essentially bricked this device a year after I bought it.
Again, I stuck it back in a drawer. I had been defeated. Earlier this year, I had an idea — would it be able to view a simple webpage that would only display one image, and also understand the META REFRESH command in the HTML so that it would reload the page every so often?
I didn’t have high hopes, but it turned out that it did! I created a quick page on my website to display only the U.S. National Weather Service Advisories map, and opened it up with the Web Browser That Won’t Load Almost Anything(tm), then pushed the “Full Screen” button so I wouldn’t have to see any borders, bars, or controls. Now, it just sits on my desk and displays the latest NWS Advisories, 24/7, reloading the map every minute. Success!
I actually had another problem after a couple days of running — it would not be able to load the map, even if it automatically reloaded. I chocked this up to the NWS website being too busy, but later noticed it kept disconnecting from my Wifi, so I had it “forget” the Wifi network, restarted it, and then it ran fine for days. The next time it locked up, it was with the map, but it’s easy to see the map is old because the timestamp is on it, and when I reloaded that seemed to fix it. It’s not perfect, but if it will run for a few days, I’m good with it — because the damn thing won’t do anything else.
If you’re wondering, the ancient HTML code was very simple (I even gave it a black background):
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60">
<TITLE>US WARNINGS</title>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#F0FFF0" LINK="#00FF00" VLINK="#C4FFC4"
ALINK="#000000" LEFTMARGIN="0" TOPMARGIN="0">
<img src="https://forecast.weather.gov/wwamap/png/US.png">
</BODY>
</HTML>