Its camera is a bit naff, it isn’t particularly quick and it feels a touch on the cheap side, but for £80 the rest of it isn’t half bad. The Fire HD 8 isn’t the slickest tablet around. Those are valid criticisms, but they ignore Fire OS’s many strengths, which include superior (and free) parental controls, and much tighter integration with Amazon’s various services. There are those who don’t like Amazon’s Fire OS (the software running on the Fire HD 8 tablet), citing incompatibility with Google Play and a lack of core Google apps. Don’t buy an Amazon Echo I say, get a Fire Tablet with Alexa for cheaper. But, why would you? Not when this is the Fire HD 8’s best, and shiniest, feature. Of course, Alexa can be disabled should you wish, and she’s completely option should her creepy eavesdropping put you off when browsing the internet. In doing so just hold down the home button and bark away. To take full advantage of Alexa, you’ll have to head over to Settings, Device options, and you’ll be presented with an option to access Alexa directly from the central home button. Amazon’s own digital assistant is an impressive one, she’ll read you audio books, tell you the weather or give you a heads up on any important events in your calendar, all at your beck and call. The best bit about this new Amazon Fire HD 8 is all about Alexa, and its integration with which is fantastic. It’s a token effort, nothing more, nothing less. It simply isn’t all that good, with all of my test shots – even those captured in good light – looking grainy and severely lacking in detail. Where the screen surprises, however, the 2-megapixel rear-facing camera resorts to type. For an £80 tablet, that’s impressive enough. I measured the contrast ratio at a punchy 968:1 with maximum brightness reaching 455cd/m 2, so even in difficult conditions – in the window seat on a train or in the car on a bright day, for example – it remains usable. Here, the HD 8 put in an unexpectedly accomplished performance.Īlthough the resolution isn’t all that high, reaching only 800 x 1,280, its fully laminated IPS panel produces a watchable, balanced image that’s easy on the eye. That’s the £50 Amazon Fire tablet’s weakest suit afterall, and I fully expected it to be the Fire HD 8’s worst area as well. Where budget tablets usually suffer in comparison with pricier models is screen quality. But then, that’s to be expected in an £80 tablet, and despite the plastic construction, the Fire HD 8 does feel reasonably robust, which is exactly what you want in a tablet likely to be handed to a child as a birthday or Christmas present.Īmazon Fire HD 8 review: Screen and camera quality The screen surround is so wide that I initially thought Amazon had sent across the wrong tablet, and it feels chunky. Although slim, it’s hardly the most arresting of sights. It’s available in the same four colours – black, blue, magenta and tangerine – and made almost entirely of plastic. Physically, it’s the same as last year’s Fire HD 8. Amazon Fire HD 8 review: DesignĮlsewhere, little has changed. It’s the longest-lasting Fire tablet we’ve tested, and lasted longer in this test than the larger Amazon Fire HD 10 by roughly four hours. In our video-rundown test – in which we set the screen to a standard brightness of 170cd/m 2, put the device into flight mode and play video continuously until the battery dies – the Fire HD 8 lasted 13hrs 4mins. Where the Fire HD 8 shines is its stamina. Amazon’s Silk browser does a good job of keeping all but the most media-heavy websites feeling responsive and usable. Importantly, too, the HD 8 will get you from A to B in Fire OS without chugging too much, it copes fine with Netflix and BBC iPlayer streaming, and it’s a reasonably accomplished tool for browsing the web. That’s not the fastest, not by a long shot, but menu navigation was reasonably smooth, and general navigation didn’t raise any red flags. In a serious case of “you get what you pay for” the Fire HD 8 scored 644 in the Geekbench 3 single-core test, and 1,854 in multi-core. it’s not particularly quick, as expected, and suffers from serious slowdown issues, but will serve you well for the most part. With zero change to its innards, the Amazon Fire HD 8 – unsurprisingly – performs near-identical to the budget tablet it supersedes. Amazon Fire HD 8 review: Performance and battery life This is the new Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet, now with Alexa. This, the 2017 version, looks identical, comes with the same quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT8163 processor and 1.5GB of RAM, but there’s something a little extra up its sleeve. In its original incarnation, the Amazon Fire HD 8 was released at the back end of 2015, along with the Amazon Fire HD 10 and the 6in, £50 Fire. Amazon followers might feel like they’ve seen this product somewhere before, and they’d be right.
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