Amazon Fire HD 8 Review

The Amazon Fire HD 8 excels at all three and is the best budget Android tablet we have tested. The Fire HD 8 starts at just 6500, but it lacks the powerful hardware or high-resolution screens of the Nvidia Shield K1 or Pixel C. Like the Shield K1, the base model of the Fire HD 8 has only 16 GB of storage, but it accepts microSD cards. It uses Amazon’s services, not Google’s, which means no Google Play Store or Google apps by default (though you can add them, with effort, if you are technically inclined).

The HD 8 is a simple tablet. A hard, textured plastic case surrounding a glass screen. It doesn’t feel premium but its not shoddy, and seems like it could take a knock or two. It flexes a little under pressure, and I reckon if you tried to you could snap it in half with enough force, but it seems relatively life-proof. Held in landscape orientation, one edge has some plastic silver buttons for power and volume, a microUSB port for charging and a headphones socket. There’s a small flip-out door hiding a microSD card slot in the top and stereo speakers in the bottom edge. At 9.2mm thick it’s not overly chunky, and weighing 341g it’s relatively easy to hold with one hand for short periods and with two hands to watch a film.

The 8in 720p display is surprisingly good for video, with solid viewing angles and plenty of brightness when using indoors. Watching something while outdoors on a sunny day might struggle, but a tablet like this is likely to be mostly used in and around the home. With a density of 189 pixels per inch, it isn’t the crispest of displays, looking like a tablet from about four years ago, rather than the high-density displays that you might be used to on a smartphone or high-end tablet. It isn’t awful; text, books, web pages and comics are easily readable, but it isn’t as pleasant an experience as pricier offerings or an e-ink device such as a Kindle. It’s no iPad, but then it’s only 6500 so you can buy almost three of them for the price of the cheapest Apple tablet.

The bottom stereo speakers are actually quite impressive for a tablet of this calibre. They’re clear and quite loud. I couldn’t quite hear them clearly over the sound of an old washing machine going like the clappers, but they were good enough to watch TV shows or a movie while making the dinner or sitting on the sofa. Turning the tablet so they pointed straight up helped. It provides easy access to Amazon ebooks, videos, apps, and music, without a ton of services and apps running in the background slowing things down. If you care about voice commands, the Fire HD 8 will soon via a software update be the first tablet with support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Fire OS’s extensive parental controls also make this a good tablet for younger children.

The Fire HD 8 works best with Amazon Prime, as subscribers get access to a selection of free music, books, and videos. If you aren’t a Prime member, you still get a selection of free apps from Amazon Underground, many of which cost money on Google’s store, plus any content in Amazon’s ecosystem you’ve purchased or uploaded (such as documents and music).

Processor and Networking:

The quad-core Mediatek MT8163 processor running at 1.3GHz is an upgrade from the Fire's MT8127D. They're the same speed, but where the Fire has an older Cortex-A7 design, the HD 8 has a newer Cortex-A53. The HD 8 also has more RAM (1.5GB compared with 1GB). On benchmarks, the HD 8 is faster than midrange phones like the LG K7 and the Motorola Moto G4 Play, and its Geekbench score is nearly double that of the 7-inch Fire. And it can at least complete the GFXBench benchmarks, where the smaller Fire can't. That means the HD 8 can handle playing games. Now, I'm not saying it's great gameplay. But Minecraft Sure. Riptide GP2? Oh heck, why not without the rich atmospheric effects you get on an iPhone 7 but you can drive boats. Kids' games Absolutely. Amazon's Appstore has a lot of very good, free games.

The dual-band, 802.11n Wi-Fi doesn't measure up to expensive tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 or the Apple iPad series. I saw consistently slower speeds on the Fire HD 8 than on a Tab S2 in many different conditions, although they have the same overall range. But the presence of 5GHz Wi-Fi is a huge advantage over the 3500 Fire. In congested areas with many Wi-Fi networks you'll see much faster speeds on 5GHz. Our test lab is an extreme case: In one spot, we will see 11Mbps down on 2.4GHz and 141Mbps down on 5GHz, using the same router and Verizon Fios connection. I found some bugs in the Wi-Fi, which will hopefully be fixed in a software update. The tablet refused to recognize one of three 5GHz routers I tested it with, and it would drop Netflix or YouTube streams about 2 to 2.5 hours in. As just pressing play again revives the stream, this isn't too much of a problem. Battery life is good, at 8 hours, 17 minutes of Netflix streaming over Wi-Fi with the screen at maximum brightness. By comparison, the 7-inch Fire lasts 6 hours, 5 minutes, while the iPad mini 4 lasts just 5 hours, 15 minutes. Recharging the tablet takes forever, though up to six hours.

Battery life:

Battery life on tablets can be a bit hit and miss. The HD 8 would get through two to three movies before needing a recharge, but setting maximum brightness reduced that a bit. Graphically intensive games also chewed through battery, but the HD 8 easily got through the day for mixed use entertainment. Standby time was impressive. Leaving it untouched for a week, it dropped only about 40% battery from full with Wi-Fi on, which means you can essentially charge it up and leave it on a coffee table without worrying about it too much. Charging time is slow though. It takes around six hours to go from zero to 100% using the included charger in the box, which is practically glacial compared to most other things.

Fire OS:

The HD 8 runs a customised version of 2014’s Android 5.0 Lollipop called Fire OS 5.3. It might be an old version of Android, but Amazon’s customisations completely change the look and feel and add features that have become common in 2016. Instead of a big grid of apps, Fire OS is based around content. Vertical shelves hold different types of content segmented into horizontally sliding panes. There’s a pane that holds recently accessed media and apps, a home pane with which users can customise with apps and other bits, one for books, one for video, one for games and so on. While it may not be the best layout for a productivity-focused machine, it puts content front and centre so its faster to get to the thing you have gone to the tablet open.

It also has features such a Blue Shade, which reduces blue light to help people sleep better when using the tablet at night, do not disturb functionality and the ability to have multiple users on the tablet, including a special limited-access kids account with parental controls. One big drawback is that the HD 8 does not have access to the Google Play Store, Google apps or any Google services that cannot be accessed through a browser. Instead it has Amazon’s App Store, which is quite well stocked with the most popular apps if not the more obscure gems. Part of Amazon’s App Store is Underground  a service that provides paid-for and apps with in app purchases for free, which is great for kids games and other apps that could wrack up expensive in app purchase bills if not careful. The HD 8 comes with adverts on its lock screen, which are shown each time the tablet is switched on. They are not particularly intrusive, but cost 700 to remove.

Cameras:

The HD 8 has a 2-megapixel rear camera, and a front-facing VGA camera producing 0.3-megapixel stills. Neither is much to write home about. The rear camera can get your point across in a quick snap, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to capture life’s memories with it. The front camera is pretty terrible for still shots, but is passable for video chats. They say the best camera is the one you have with you. In this case it’s definitely the phone in your pocket, not the tablet in your hand.

Verdict:

Like the 7in Amazon Fire tablet before it, the HD 8 does a great job of not being a frustrating, terrible experience for just 6400. Is it fantastic No. But it’s a tablet for 6400 that isn’t terrible, which is an achievement in and of itself. The screen is pretty good for video and passable for text and images. It feels well put together, even if it isn’t a premium experience, and with a microSD card slot and 16GB of storage built in there’s plenty of space for photos, movies and TV shows. As with any other Amazon tablet, you really need a Prime subscription to get the best out of the tablet, with access to Amazon’s movies, TV shows, books and music services.

The question is whether the HD 8 is worth 2800 more than the standard 7in Fire. If the tablet is going to be used primarily for video and games, then it probably is. The screen is brighter, better quality and slightly higher resolution, and it handles games better. It’s a basic experience, but no other new tablet comes close to being as good as the HD 8 for a regular sale price of under 7000. Amazon, as with the 3500 7in Fire, has cut the right corners on the Fire HD 8 and made pretty good budget tablet.

Pros: cheap, microSD card slot, feels durable, good integration with Amazon services, lots of free apps in the Amazon App Store, Amazon Underground, good parental controls

Cons: average screen, terrible cameras, takes a long time to charge, average performance, no access to the Google Play Store

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