As you may already know if you are currently an Amazon Prime member (and it seems more and more people are signing up for this), today is their ‘Prime Day‘ – an attempt to create a new special online shopping day with a one-day range of crazy bargains akin to Black Friday.
Now, here’s the thing if you don’t already have Prime, which costs $99 a year. Amazon is offering a 30 day free trial of Prime, which gives you full access to all their Prime Day bargains. That alone is a great reason to start clicking over to Amazon.
There are a few deals that particularly stand out that I thought to quickly share with you. In most cases, quantities are limited, and in all cases, the deals disappear at midnight tonight (not sure which timezone – I think Pacific). I’d urge you to immediately go and check out any deals that appeal.
Amazon 7″ Fire Tablet : Normally an already astonishingly low $50, now $33.33. Buy half a dozen, for future gifts, and general use. I’ve reviewed this unit here, and while I prefer the larger 8″ unit, at $33 for the 7″ Fire instead of $150 for the 8″, there’s no cheaper/better value way of having a convenient sized high quality tablet.
Probably I’d buy the 8GB unit and then get a high capacity Micro SD card, instead of paying $20 extra to get the 16GB version. Here’s a 64GB Micro SD card for only $15, which is probably the ‘sweet spot’ for value/capacity; otherwise, there are 128GB cards for $33 and new 200GB cards for $59, also available from that same page.
Kindle Paperwhite : Normally $180, sometimes seen at $160, and today at $120. You might wonder why you’d still want to get a black and white Kindle reader when you can get almost four color Fire 7″ tablets for the same price. That’s a fair question! The answer is ‘battery life’. The e-Ink screen on the Kindle lasts way longer (maybe ten times longer) than the battery in the Fire tablet. The Paperwhite reader is also ‘easier on the eyes’ (due to a much higher pixel density, and that’s important when reading text for an extended period), and lighter/thinner.
I discuss the Paperwhite and other options here. But you’ll note that when I wrote that article, a year ago, the Paperwhite was selling for $120 back then, too. So while the $120 price is good, it is not quite in the ‘best deal ever’ category that the Fire tablet is, and probably this deal will be repeated in the future.
SanDisk 960GB SSD : Normally $225, on sale today for $165. If you want to supercharge your laptop or desktop computer, consider replacing its hard drive with this solid state drive. For a laptop, you’ll get an astonishing transformation in computer speed (traditional laptop hard drives tend to be slower than in desktop computers), slightly longer battery life (the SSD uses less power) and slightly greater physical robustness (with no moving parts, if your drop your laptop, it won’t be the hard drive that breaks, but of course it might be other things instead!).
This unit has a standard interface and 2.5″ size so is compatible with just about all laptops and most desktop computers. Swapping out my regular hard drive for one of these SSDs was the best thing I ever did with my laptop.
Emergency Battery Chargers : Amazon has a bunch of them in their Prime Day sale, and as is happily always the case, they have greater capacity and less size/weight than ever before. Unless you want the smallest size possible, you should look for something with at least 10,000 mAH capacity, and at least 2 charging outlets, and the ability to supply power at more than 0.5A charging rate.
There’s a lot more. Go browse around and see what catches your eye. These are merely a few of the deals that seemed to me to be most relevant and best value. And note that some of the deals seem to be very little better than the regular pricing, so, as always, caveat emptor!
