![]() In a way, they're basically digital Amazon catalogs, allowing you to easily shop and catch up on the latest Prime Video shows. They use Android at their core, but they feature a custom "Fire OS" that puts all of the shopping giant's services front and center. It’s a little grating when your tablet starts to try and sell you apps and items this blatantly.From the beginning, Amazon took a different route with its Fire tablets. They’re more distracting and have more obvious "Buy" buttons than they used to have. You can pay $15 to eliminate these, and you should consider it. It could also be the Special Offers-ads that show on the homescreen. It has finally upgraded its Android-based system to Google’s 2016 Android 7.1-which may be causing some of that extra lag. The battery life is also a couple hours shorter than last year, thanks to (guess who?) Alexa.Īmazon hasn’t upgraded the main processor, graphics, RAM, or almost anything else inside the Fire 8 in several years. It may still be functional, but this Fire seems slower, with more lag, freezes, and jitters when you’re navigating menus and opening apps. ![]() When you aren’t using it as a makeshift Echo, the Fire HD 8 begins to show its age and limitations. The Fire HD 8’s speakers can play music decently loud, too-not as clearly as many dedicated smart displays, and sometimes tinnier, but if music isn’t your top concern, it’s a fun setup. (Amazon made a special Echo dock to help you.) It works well, and is a cheaper and more flexible option than buying a smart display. Thanks to hands-free Alexa, you can now talk to Amazon's digital assistant from across the room, or put the tablet in Show Mode to turn it into an Echo Show-type device. That means you can nab games like Candy Crush and popular apps like Facebook and Netflix. The Fire HD 8 ticks off most must-have features for a tablet, and like other Amazon devices its entire interface is centered around serving you the best content Amazon (and Amazon Prime) has to offer-books, videos, music, magazines, all of it-and if you get to know the interface, you’ll figure out how to find other apps on Amazon’s own Appstore. Both exist mostly to sit and go unused-they don’t take good photos and aren’t particularly great for video calling either-but they are there and can theoretically do these things, which is sorta the point on a tablet this affordable. It joins the 2-megapixel camera on the back. It’s a 2-megapixel unit now, up from 0.3 MP (also known as VGA resolution). The selfie camera also technically got an upgrade this year. A 64GB card should be more than enough space to download what you want. You can now save movies and other media to cards up to 400GB. It’s not a deal-breaking annoyance, but it becomes a quirk of the ownership experience.Īmazon has also included a MicroSD slot again, which will come in handy for long vacations or trips. ![]() No matter how familiar I get with the Fire tablets, I still have to feel around for the volume keys sometimes, and get them confused with the similarly-shaped power button. There’s a volume, power, an audio jack, and a microUSB for charging-typical stuff that you'd find on a phone. Most of the buttons and connectors are on the top, if you hold it vertically, like a book. Like previous 8-inch Fires, the screen still tends to attract fingerprint gunk more than other tablets, though you get used to it fairly quick. Amazon even placed a tiny lip around the edge of the screen to help prevent cracking or scratching if you drop it. It’s a travel-sized 8-inch (1,280 x 800 pixel) glass screen cradled by a cheap-feeling though somewhat durable plastic that you can buy in all three basic colors, and black. The new Fire HD 8 is pretty much the same, inside and out, as last year’s model, and the 2016 model before that. ![]() ![]() Its sequel-the 8th generation of Fire tablets, for those keeping count-is still dirt cheap and completely functional, just a little less fun to use. Last autumn, I recommended the 2017 Fire HD 8 and named it the best of Amazon’s bundle of affordable tablets. ![]()
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