Review of Amazon Fire HD 10 and Fire HD 8

VERDICT

Poor performance and sub-par screen resolutions leave you questioning the purpose of these affordable tablets.

PROS:

Low price
Impressive speakers
Improved FireOS

CONS:

Terrible screen resolution
Sluggish performance
Plasticky design

Prior to the launch of the Amazon Fire HD 10 and the Amazon Fire HD 8, it was tempting to question whether the online retail giant had full confidence in its tablet family.

With all of the aggressive price cuts, near-constant offers, and creative payment plans Amazon seems to come up with to make you buy from its growing tablet range, it makes you wonder.

The Amazon Fire HD 10 and Amazon Fire HD 8 are two new ultra-affordable tablets with almost identical entry-level specs (which is why they're being treated as one here). In an industry dominated by the premium iPad brand, has Amazon finally happened upon a winning affordable tablet formula?

At £169.99 / $229.99 for the Amazon Fire HD 10 and £129.99 / $149.99 for the Amazon Fire HD 8, the online retail giant is clearly intent on remaining aggressive with its pricing.

But Amazon's tablets have always been great value. The questions have always concerned their wider usefulness, and Amazon's own stifling approach to software and apps.

Has Amazon finally got the right balance with its latest tablets?

Design

Amazon tablets have always been well built for their price, if a little functional. The Amazon Fire HD 10 and 8 make tentative steps towards a bolder, slinkier style, but their designs are still primarily focused on being hard-wearing.

Indeed, Amazon is making much of its latest tablets' durability in the accompanying blurb. The new duo "stand up to everyday life", and are "1.8 times more durable than the iPad Air 2 ", apparently.

Amazon Fire HD review

It's a curious comparison to make in some ways, but the message is clear: Amazon's new tablets will stand up to daily wear and tear twice as well as the world's most popular tablet.

I didn't put the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8 through my own tumble test, but I can attest to them being solidly built, rugged tablets that you'd back in any couch or waist-height spill onto a hard kitchen or living room floor.

The design here is quite different to older Amazon tablets, though. It incorporates a surprisingly shiny plastic back that reminded me of the kind of smartphones and laptops you used to get circa 2010.

These things are absolute fingerprint magnets, and I can only imagine how horrific they'll look after being placed in the grubby mitts of a small child - as they doubtless will be by many parents.

Amazon Fire HD review

Turn the tablets around onto their sides, however, and you'll notice a subtle switch to a matte plastic material, which looks a great deal more rugged, and more capable of hiding dirt and nicks.

The overall impression of the Fire HD design is cheap but solid, which is perhaps the kind of description Amazon would prefer we affixed to the tablets as a whole.

Amazon Fire HD review

Another curious design touch is the decision to relocate the power and volume buttons to the top of the devices as you look at them in portrait view.

The intention is clear: Amazon doesn't want you to view this as the top of the devices, but rather the side. These Amazon HD tablets are intended to be used in landscape mode, in keeping with their primary function as media players.

Or at least, that's evidently the intention with the Fire HD 10. Check out the official Amazon page for the HD 8 and you'll see portrait-orientation and landscape-orientation images in roughly equal numbers.

Amazon Fire HD review

Still, overall the onus in on landscape usage for the Fire HD range. I can understand this approach, but the fact remains that when I pull a tablet out to check something, I usually do so in portrait mode.

In such situations, reaching to the top of the device to wake it or turn the volume up never feels intuitive - or at least, it hasn't become so in the period I've been using them.

Perhaps the worst decision Amazon has made with the HD 8, and certainly with the HD 10, relates to their screens. On one level they're perfectly adequate, laminated displays with IPS technology. This means that the picture appears to sit right near the surface of the device, and that viewing angles are fairly wide.

Both tablets also feature an unusual 16:10 aspect ratio, which means they're perfectly shaped for watching movies. Of course, it makes them seem a little stretched in portrait view, but as I've mentioned that's not the perspective Amazon is angling for here.

However, the problem is that the 1280 x 800 resolution of these screens is entirely inadequate for a modern tablet - and it takes its toll on the 10.1-inch HD 10 in particular, where those few pixels are spread over a much bigger canvass.

Amazon Fire HD review

Photos, videos, web pages, games - everything visibly suffers from the lack of sharpness on offer here.

Things are a fair bit better with the 8-inch HD 8, as it offers a much smaller and thus more pixel-dense picture (189ppi versus 149ppi). But the resolution is still insufficient, especially when you consider that even mid-range 5-inch smartphones tend to come with sharper 1080p displays these days.

In terms of affordable tablets, the now-defunct Nexus 7 sported a 1920 x 1200 resolution for its even smaller 7-inch display. Samsung still produces cheap tablets with such similarly low resolution to the HD 8 and HD 10 (think the Tab 4 range), but they haven't been particularly well received either.

Arguably the key feature of any Amazon tablet is its price. It could be argued that they're not really rivals to the iPad as such - rather, they're acceptable alternatives for those who find Apple's pricing prohibitive.

But are these latest efforts really that cheap? As mentioned in the intro, the Amazon Fire HD 10 goes for £169.99 / $229.99, while the Amazon Fire HD 8 sells for £129.99 / $149.99.

Amazon Fire HD review

By contrast, the cheapest iPad Apple sells is the 8-inch, £219 / $269 iPad mini 2. Compare it to the 8-inch Amazon HD, and taken one way you're paying 70% more for two-year-old technology.

Of course, the iPad Mini 2 remains superior to both the Amazon Fire HD 8 and the HD 10 in almost every way, but that quality comes at a premium that some will be unwilling to pay.

A more damaging value-based comparison to the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8 is the Tesco Hudl 2 . That 8.3-inch tablet sells for £99, yet it has none of the Amazon tablets' major weaknesses with regard to display fidelity and OS constraints.

Another defining feature of these two tablets is the simple fact that they're Amazon tablets. This means they're very good for accessing Amazon content - and that's never been a more enticing feature than it is right now.

Amazon Fire HD review

I'll discuss exactly what's available content-wise a little later, but an Amazon Prime membership now offers up a broad range of media, all readily available to stream and download to your device.

Of course, Amazon has made this media available on Android and iOS devices too, but nowhere is it better integrated than on its own tablets. Viewed as affordable ways to dip into this rich reservoir of media content, the HD 10 and HD 8 appear rather more impressive.

Speakers

Amazon Fire HD review

Both the HD 10 and the HD 8 also have great speakers. They're not ideally placed on the bottom of the devices - my preference is for front-mounted speakers, where they can't be covered - but even when the tablets are propped on your lap they're very loud and clear.

They also achieve decent stereo separation, owing to their positioning towards either corner of the devices. Movies and TV content might not look great on those low-res screens, then, but they'll sound decent, even if you don't have a set of headphones to hand.

One of the main criticisms of Amazon tablets in the past has been their software. FireOS simply hasn't been much cop for anything other than consuming Amazon content.

Fortunately, FireOS 5 on the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8 is much improved, at least in terms of the interface design. It's been stripped back from its previous patronisingly zoomed-in carousel style, and it's now a little closer to the Android 5.1 OS that underpins it.

Amazon Fire HD review

The home screen now shows several rows of installed apps, and you can scroll down to reveal more. Scrolling left and right, meanwhile, will take you to specific media sections for books, videos, games, apps, and more.

It's more reminiscent of the kind of media app you might find on your smart TV than a regular tablet UI, but it's reasonably intuitive.

What it isn't is fluid. I don't know if it's the new Amazon Fire HD range's limited hardware poke (both have the same mediocre MediaTek quad-core CPU and 1GB of RAM) or inefficiencies in FireOS 5's code - possibly it's a combination of both - but the experience is frequently laggy.

The three on-screen control buttons (another sign of Android peeking through) are often unresponsive, and trying to do anything else while downloading apps in the background is an exercise in frustration. Even waking the tablet from sleep seems to take half a second, which is half-a-second too long.

For all Amazon's efforts to make a distinctive tablet OS, FireOS is still inferior to plain Android, not to mention the iPad mini 2's iOS. And when that already sub-par OS performs as sluggishly as it does with the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8 - well, it doesn't make for a great combination.

Amazon Fire HD review

Elsewhere, performance is actually perfectly adequate. Step into an HD video stream or even a complex 3D game, and everything moves along at an appreciable pop, suggesting that this is indeed more of a FireOS issue than a hardware one.

I put both tablets through their paces with games of Real Racing 3, Dead Trigger 3, Monument Valley and Space Marshals - all graphically rich games in their own way - and the two tablets barely stuttered.

Of course, part of the reason for this creditable gaming performance is the Fire HD duo's poor screen resolution, which places less demand on the GPU, but still.

Putting them through the usual Geekbench 3 benchmark test I got very similar results from both, which is understandable given their identical hardware configuration. The average single-core score of 779 is about equal to the Hudl 2, but the 1506 multi-core score is a fair amount behind the Tesco tablet (which scored 2147) and the iPad mini 2 (at 2220).

All in all, the Amazon Fire HD family is arguably found most wanting here in the interface and performance category, which isn't a great situation to be in given the strength of the competition.

Battery

Battery performance on the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8 is about par for the tablet course. Amazon claims eight hours of mixed use for both, which is the same as the Hudl 2, and my experience would suggest this is accurate.

Both tablets lasted through a day of moderate usage, but they're perhaps not the outright strong performers you might be hoping for when it comes to consuming media over protracted periods.

Amazon Fire HD review

The regular techradar battery test involves running a 90-minute 720p video with the screen brightness cranked up to full. The HD 10 was left with 74% battery on average, while the HD 8, with its smaller battery, was left with 70%.

Both results are better than the Hudl 2, which could only manage 64%, probably due in part to its sharper display.

Ultimately, you'll be able to play a couple of full-length movies on both the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8 and still have enough juice for a little light gaming and emailing - but that's really the least you'd expect from a media-focused tablet.

One of the defining flaws of Amazon's tablets in the past has been their lack of utility compared with other popular tablets.

Obviously the iPad range has its strong stock Apple apps and access to the imperious iOS App Store, while Android has access to Google's peerless apps and the pretty well-stocked Google Play Store.

Amazon's tablets don't have access to any such goodies, despite FireOS being built on solid Android foundations. Amazon has opted to go it alone along a forked Android path, and this decision continues to bite their tablets in the behind.

Amazon Fire HD review

The Fire HD 10 and 8 have an adequate spread of solid default apps covering the essentials, including email, calendar, weather, calculator, contacts, clocks, and even maps.

But none of these are as good as the Google equivalents that are available on even a bog-standard Android tablet, not to mention on the iPad. What's more, the Amazon Appstore remains a substandard place to source alternatives.

I wasn't fond of the stock keyboard that comes with both Amazon Fire HD tablets either. In landscape mode - and this is the orientation Amazon intends you to use the most, remember - it somehow feels simultaneously overstretched and a little cramped.

Amazon Fire HD review

It seems poorly optimised for the extra space a tablet affords, with no dedicated numerical keys, among other issues. That said, it does offer an impressive number of word suggestions as you type, and it also has a built-in swipe-to-type system should you prefer it.

Put simply, you'll be able to do pretty much everything you'd want to do on a tablet on your Amazon Fire HD 10 or HD 8, but you probably won't be able to do it quite as well as on most other tablets.

Camera

The Amazon Fire HD 10 and the Fire HD 8 come packing an identical 5-megapixel main camera. It probably won't surprise you to learn that it's not very good, but it certainly surprised me by just how bad it is.

Focusing seemed to be a real issue during my time with both tablets, with attempts at simple sunny day landscape snaps producing blurry, ill-defined results. I also found that I regularly had to manually tap to focus if I wanted to get anything approaching a clear shot.

Amazon Fire HD review

Meanwhile, moving in for a close-up shot of a sunlit flower resulted in a gaudy, blown-out foreground subject and a murky background. Closer macro shots seemed beyond the camera's capabilities.

I'd never recommend using any tablet as your main camera, and I wouldn't even stretch to accepting most as an occasional point and shoot alternative. In the case of the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8, however, I'd go one step further and actively advise against using their cameras at all - they're that bad.

Amazon Fire HD review

These aren't smartphones, of course, so the camera quality isn't particularly important or all that relevant to the duo's overall success. But be warned: if you do tend to use your tablet for casual snaps (and anecdotal evidence suggests many people do), you're unlikely to get even passable results here.

Media

As I've been emphasising, playing media is the central function of the Amazon Fire HD 10 and HD 8.

Both tablets are hard-wired into the Amazon ecosystem, offering instant access to the retailer's online videos, ebooks, music, apps and more. This means your experience with the devices is greatly enhanced if you have an Amazon Prime membership.

Amazon Fire HD review

In fact, I'd argue that Prime membership is essential if you're considering purchasing one of these Amazon tablets.

Amazon Prime Instant Video in particular is an increasingly impressive service that offers a viable alternative to Netflix. Its original TV content isn't perhaps quite at the same level (although it's improving all the time), but its free movie selection is arguably superior.

Amazon Music isn't anywhere near as well developed, with a severely limited selection of tracks compared with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. I also found it irritating that there was no lock screen widget for this music player, seemingly thanks to the screen-filling ad system that helps subsidise the devices (unless you opt to pay a little extra initially).

Amazon Fire HD review

Storage is one of the few areas in which the HD 10 and HD 8 differ slightly. The HD 10 is available with either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, while the HD 8 comes with 8GB or 16GB.

8GB seems inadequate regardless of your needs, although with most varieties of Amazon media streamable, it's only really an issue when it comes to downloading lots of apps, or if you need to load up your tablet with lots of media for an extended trip.

And if storage does become an issue, both tablets come with a microSD slot for expansion purposes.

Amazon Fire HD review

As already noted, both tablets are reasonably capable when it comes to playing games. Rather than performance, the major issue here is the relative lack of games available through the Amazon Appstore.

It doesn't compare well to the Google Play Store range that's available on most other Android-based devices.

Amazon Fire HD review