A covered microSD slot sits on the right edge, with stereo speakers on the left edge. The top of the tablet holds most of the ports and controls: a USB C charging socket, headphone jack, power and volume buttons, and a microphone. If your main use for this tablet will be watching HD content on Netflix (or as Amazon would prefer, Prime Video,) you’ll be more than satisfied here. The 10.1″ screen is the most obvious example, a bright 1920×1080 display with clarity and colors that are as good as you’ll get at this price point. While other budget tablets generally look and perform like the low-cost devices they are, Amazon’s hardware and design are a step up, and that’s especially true for the “premium” model, the Fire HD 10. Amazon has since released the 2021 version that’s slightly smaller and has minor specification updates, but is otherwise largely the same.Īmazon’s tablet hardware has long been pretty impressive for the money. Note: this review is of the 2019 model of the Fire HD 10. After a week of solid use, these are my thoughts on the Amazon Fire HD 10. I pulled out the credit card, hit the buy button, and started waiting impatiently beside the door. When I saw the company advertising a Fire sale (get it?), it finally pushed me over the edge. The best example of that? Amazon’s Fire range, most of which has had an upgrade in the last year and offers a lot of tablet for not a lot of money. That’s mainly because budget models have got a lot better since 2013, and cheap no longer has to equal terrible. I also wanted it to cost a lot less, because spending a few hundred dollars on a tablet these days feels extravagant. I no longer had to buy the smallest model, since I wasn’t living out of a backpack anymore. When it finally came time to buy another, both the tablet market and my needs had changed. Seven years, to be exact, since I’d walked out of a Best Buy in Vancouver, Washington with a new Google Nexus 7 tucked under my arm. If you don't use those services, that might become annoying over time.Īt the starting price of $80, the new Fire HD 8 is firmly in the "good enough" category, and that's all most people want from a seven-inch tablet.It’d been a long time since I last bought a tablet. Even if you pay extra for the Fire HD 8 without ads (or pay Amazon later to remove them), the home screen still has tabs for Kindle books, Prime Video, and Audible downloads. It's better than it used to be, but every aspect of the system is still an advertisement for Amazon products. There are also plenty of cases and screen protectors already available, which you can't say for most of the white-label Android tablets in this price range. It handles media playback, games, and web browsing without a problem, and the USB Type-C port is a nice upgrade from previous Fire HD 8 tablets. The new Fire HD 8 isn't a hardware powerhouse, but for $90, there's not a whole lot missing that you could reasonably expect at this price point. Should you buy it? Rating 8/10 Amazon Fire HD 8 (10th Gen, 2020) I also installed the F-Droid app store, so I could download a few of my favorite open-source apps that weren't available on Amazon's store. If you want to check if certain apps are available on the Fire HD 8 before buying it, have a look through the Appstore website. The general selection is more limited than the Play Store, but most of the major media streaming platforms and communication tools are available, and there of course a lot of games. Unlike most Android devices, you get the Amazon Appstore for downloading apps and games, instead of the Google Play Store. There is some missing functionality - the custom DNS setting introduced in Pie isn't available, and Amazon's home screen launcher doesn't seem to support app shortcuts - but most of the functionality that doesn't directly rely on Google services is present. That's a nice upgrade from the Android 7.1-based system on the previous Fire HD 8 tablet, since it includes better battery life (due to more background restrictions), support for notification channels, more explicit permissions for apps, and Picture-in-Picture support for video. This tablet comes with Fire OS 7 out of the box, which is based on Android 9 Pie.
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