Amazon Fire HD 8 (2017) Review - Review 2022

Best of the Year 2022 Amazon's $79.99 Fire Hd 8 (16GB) is the best sub-$100 tablet bachelor right now. With a lower price, stronger Wi-Fi, and better sound than the previous model, information technology takes the crown abroad from its less-expensive sibling, the $49.99 Fire seven. While you shouldn't expect to compete confronting the iPad at this price betoken, the Fire HD 8 fits the neb for media consumption and light gaming, making it our Editors' Pick for affordable tablets.

Physical Class

The Burn HD 8 is a plastic-shelled tablet available in blackness, blue, cerise, and xanthous. Information technology measures eight.4 by v.0 by 0.4 inches and 13 ounces. It's a decent size to hold in ane hand as an ebook reader, but information technology'south a bit also heavy for marathon reading sessions (the Kindle Paperwhite weighs 7.2 ounces, a big difference). It'south non formally ruggedized or water resistant, but the plastic trounce can withstand average drops and knocks.

The HD 8's 1,280-by-800 LCD has 189 pixels per inch and isn't the brightest. The smaller Burn down vii has a brighter but less dumbo screen at 171ppi. The Hd eight'southward brandish also tends to be a little yellow, while the Burn down 7 is powerfully blue (neither is particularly evenly white). The extra pixels hither actually brand a difference when reading comics and online magazines, though. Small text in the PCMag Digital Edition is considerably more than readable on the Hard disk drive 8 than on the smaller tablet, and comics panels accept a bit more room to breathe.

Amazon isn't birthday sure whether the tablet should exist used in portrait or landscape mode. The dual stereo speakers are on the bottom in mural, simply on the left in portrait; the front-facing VGA camera is on the top in portrait, but on the left in landscape. Likewise on the top border (in portrait mode) are the headphone jack, volume buttons, power button and micro USB port for charging and syncing with PCs.

Chipset and Networking

The Hard disk drive 8 uses the same quad-core, one.3GHz Mediatek processor the Fire 7 does, running the aforementioned Fire OS 5.iv software, based on Android v.1. But performance on the Hard disk drive 8 is distinctly better considering information technology has 1.5GB of RAM as compared with the Hd 7'south 1GB. That means UI icons return more speedily, apps crash less often, and web benchmarks score higher, making for a real difference in usability.

Amazon Fire HD 8 (2017)

Dual-ring Wi-Fi is condign more standard on affordable tablets, and that'due south a very good thing. In PCMag'south examination lab, for case, the 2.4GHz band is so congested that we get much better speeds at 5GHz. The Hard disk drive 8'south 5GHz Wi-Fi is considerably faster than the Fire 7'due south, possibly considering of the deviation in RAM. In several tests at dissimilar distances from our Netgear router, nosotros often got well-nigh double the speed on the HD eight than on the Burn 7. That made a real difference when doing things like downloading comics.

Battery life, at 4 hours, 42 minutes of spider web video streaming at maximum screen brightness, is fine but not great. You lot'll probably get much longer battery life in mixed usage, as Amazon'due south Silk web browser eats up a lot of ability. Invest in a 10,000mAh backup battery like the Anker PowerCore 10000 and you won't take to worry.

Burn down Os and Alexa

Amazon'southward Fire tablets, while Android compatible, are all-time thought of equally Amazon media consumption devices. With a bit of piece of work, you lot tin can turn them into general-purpose Android slates, but we think the Amazon restrictions tin be a blessing in disguise: They forbid you lot from getting too frustrated with your inexpensive tech.

Amazon's Fire Bone is derived from Android, and it runs Android apps, merely the basic UI is cypher like Android. If you honey Amazon, there's a lot to honey here. The interface is much simpler and clearer than on most Android tablets, with bold words pointing the way to Books, Video, Games, Music, and Audiobooks. Your Amazon content library is automatically synced, loaded, and shown in every pane, and you lot have the selection to stream or download content. Nearly every folio tries to sell you something equally well. This is Amazon, after all, so the visitor is guessing what yous like and trying to provide more than of it for y'all.

Amazon Fire HD 8 Inline 1

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The Os comes with its own navigation, document reader, and email apps supporting the about common services and formats. To download apps, the tablet defaults to the Amazon Appstore. You tin sideload other Android apps using APK files transferred from a PC or a microSD card, only there'southward no official or reliable way to use the Google Play store on these tablets; there are hacks, merely they tend to break when Amazon upgrades its OS. The Amazon Appstore has plenty of Android apps, but information technology's missing some big names.

All of the Google apps (such every bit YouTube) are absent-minded, equally are some Microsoft Part apps, many pop navigation and transit apps such equally Citymapper and Waze, whatever alternative web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, and the American Airlines and Delta apps, for example. Of form, you can always get to the mobile sites, merely information technology isn't the same. Nosotros turned to a fill-in APK from a phone so we could load Curiosity Unlimited.

By default, the lock screen shows colorful ads for products on Amazon. Correct now, our unit of measurement is shifting betwixt a clay mask kit and a 10,400mAh ability bank (not the Anker one nosotros recommend!). Yous can become rid of those ads for $15.

In that location are some pluses to Amazon'southward Android spin-off. Nearly notably, the kids' content and parental controls are excellent, with a $ii.99/calendar month FreeTime Unlimited subscription service stuffed with age-appropriate books and videos, and a web dashboard for parents that lets you monitor and control the usage of up to 4 child accounts.

Amazon'due south tablets support Alexa, and a new Show Mode feature essentially turns the HD eight into an Echo Testify. When paired with a $39.99 Prove Mode Charging Dock, things like time, date, notifications, weather, directions, recipes, and news briefings tin all be displayed on its screen through vocalization commands.

Amazon Fire HD 8 Inline 2

Music and Video

The Hard disk drive 8 comes in 16 and 32GB models (the 32GB model is $30 more). The 16GB model, which we reviewed, has 12.24GB free. There's as well a micro SD memory carte slot, and you can store content and most apps on the memory card.

The HD 8's dual speakers are a large, positive surprise. Virtually affordable tablets, including the Fire 7, accept a single, tinny speaker. Simply the HD 8's two bottom-mounted speakers give you truthful stereo sound in landscape mode, and generally bigger and improve-divers audio than you'll become from other similarly priced tablets in every use example.

Video playback suffered a fiddling bit considering of the slightly dim screen. Videos sound great and play smoothly, but we had problem making out night scenes on the screen in a bright room. The Fire 7 does a scrap improve there.

The HD 8 and Fire seven take 2-megapixel cameras on the back and VGA cameras on the front end. The less said about them, the better. They oasis't improved from the previous models, taking low-framerate videos and grainy images in whatever sort of depression-light state of affairs.

Conclusions

The Amazon Burn Hard disk drive 8 is all-time cheap tablet experience you lot tin notice under $100. It's good every bit a color ebook reader, an audiobook player, and especially as a kids' tablet. Its main downside is the lack of the Google Play store; hacking your way around that can go tiring quickly. But Amazon makes it very like shooting fish in a barrel to download and manage content from its own stores, with an especially safe feel for kids.

If you absolutely demand Google Play, turn to the Lenovo Tab 4 8. You'll pay a bit more and lose dual-band Wi-Fi, but you'll gain access to Google'due south collection of apps. At that indicate, though, you lot might start chafing confronting the low-end tablets' functioning. Amazon's OS doesn't over-promise, and the new Fire Hd 8 delivers.