A cheap tablet hampered by outdated software

The newest Amazon Fire HD 8, up to date last month and beginning at $100, is a modest refresh, providing extra RAM, a nominally upgraded digital camera and a few new AI options. The normal gross sales pitch, nevertheless, stays the identical: You get a just-competent tablet for the necessities at a dirt-cheap (and often-discounted) value, and in change, Amazon will get to plant one other equipment for its personal apps and providers in your house. Nothing about this replace drastically adjustments that settlement, however after utilizing the tablet for the previous month (and after utilizing older Fire tablets for years prior), it might be time to demand extra from Amazon’s finish of the discount.

It’s positively a cheap tablet

Physically, the brand new Fire HD 8 is sort of similar to the final one. It is, surely, A Budget Tablet — it’s nowhere close to premium, however it doesn’t really feel distractingly cheap both. At just below eight inches tall and 0.37 inches thick, it’s sufficiently small for most children to function with out a lot battle and most adults to hold with one hand. If you care extra about your tablet’s travel-friendliness than its virtues as a miniature TV, this measurement needs to be nice. The complete factor is light-weight at 0.74 kilos, so it’s not an anchor in your bag. Its textured plastic body is considerably slippery however altogether sturdy, with no creaking or flexing. Its gently rounded edges dig comfortably into your palms. There are pretty thick bezels across the show, however I’ve by no means minded these on a tablet — they provide your thumbs a pure place to relaxation.

The show gained’t win any awards. It’s the identical LCD panel Amazon has trotted out in earlier generations, with the identical 1,280 x 800 decision. If you’ve used any iPad, and even many midrange Android tablets, within the final decade, every thing about will probably be an apparent downgrade. The meager pixel density (189 ppi) makes photos and textual content visibly much less sharp. Colors are extra muted, too. It doesn’t get brilliant sufficient to be completely usable in direct daylight; you’ll be able to learn it comfortably on the sofa, however don’t count on it to work as effectively by the pool. It’s additionally a smudge and fingerprint magnet.

Again, although, the Fire HD 8 is competing in a distinct weight class than even an older iPad. The proven fact that the display screen is comparatively small makes the decrease decision a minimum of tolerable. You can watch Netflix or learn Kindle books and never assume “man, this sucks” the entire time, particularly in the event you purchased the factor for effectively underneath $100.

There are different {hardware} compromises. The audio system aren’t all that loud and battle to totally separate totally different components of songs. They’re totally on the left edge while you maintain the tablet vertically, which all the time sounds odd. There’s an outdated USB-C 2.0 port for charging and a glacially sluggish 5W energy adapter within the field. Amazon says it’ll take about 5 hours to totally cost the tablet with that; you’ll be able to minimize the wait in half in the event you convey your personal 15W charger, although that’s nonetheless not quick. There’s no water resistance ranking, so that you’ll must be cautious in the event you ever need to learn within the tub. Both the five-megapixel rear digital camera and 2MP entrance digital camera are brutal, washing out colours and blurring nice particulars even in good lighting. (As all the time, please report anybody utilizing their tablet as a digital camera to the closest authorities.)

It’s not all unhealthy. While the Fire HD 8 solely comes with 32GB or 64GB of storage in-built — of which solely 25GB or 54GB is usable, respectively — you’ll be able to add as much as 1TB of further house with a microSD card. The 13-inch iPad Pro, which begins at $1,299, doesn’t allow you to try this (I’m simply saying!). The Fire HD 8 additionally has a headphone jack, which helps offset the mediocre speaker efficiency just a little bit, plus there’s Bluetooth for wi-fi headphones. And one good thing about the shoddy show decision is that it makes the Fire HD 8 much less power-hungry: Amazon charges the tablet’s battery life at as much as 13 hours. I bought way more than that in our (comparatively forgiving) battery check, however nearer to 10 or 11 hours with extra strenuous use. Either manner, it’s good. Most individuals can safely count on it to outlive a day of fundamental streaming and internet shopping.

The new Fire HD 8 runs on a 2 GHz six-core processor (the MediaTek MT8169A). The base mannequin consists of 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, whereas a $130 variant with twice the storage bumps the reminiscence as much as 4GB. I examined the previous. The earlier era solely got here with 2GB of RAM — the pricier “Fire HD 8 Plus” had 3GB — so it is a welcome improve.

That stated, it’s not an enormous enhance. With the entry-level mannequin, the gist is identical because it’s been with previous Fire HD tablets: You can get by with easy video streaming, internet shopping, studying and gaming, however there’ll be hitches and occasional crashes alongside the way in which, and it’ll by no means be highly effective sufficient for critical work or dependable multitasking. The fashionable internet is simply too ad-heavy and grossly inefficient for a low-end chip like this, so that you’ll inevitably should take care of some choppiness when loading media-heavy websites like ESPN or The New York Times. Apps take only a bit longer to open than they’d on a pricier tablet, and it’s not unusual to get some lag while you leap again to the house display screen.

Still, for the cash, it’s all workable. It doesn’t take ceaselessly to open a Peacock stream or load an article on Engadget. The Mali-G52 GPU may even deal with an honest degree of gaming — informal card and match-three video games run nice, and much more concerned fare like PUBG Mobile and Diablo Immortal are completely playable, albeit with severely low-res textures. On the Geekbench 5 benchmark, the Fire HD 8 earned a single-core rating of 193 and a multi-core rating of 907. That is lightyears away from spectacular, however provided that the last-gen model struggled to even full the assessments with out crashing, it’s nonetheless a step up.

Ultimately, it’s about managing expectations. You don’t purchase a $100 tablet demanding a workhorse. When reductions convey that tablet’s value beneath $60, “not always annoying” turns into a praise. If you’ll be able to afford the mannequin with 4GB of RAM, that ought to maintain up higher over time. Then once more, a tool like this makes probably the most sense when it’s as cheap as attainable.

The ad-pocalypse that’s Fire OS

The Fire HD 8 nonetheless runs on Amazon’s Fire OS, a fork of Android 11 that makes use of a customized app retailer and is designed to place Amazon’s personal apps and providers within the highlight. (For the document, inventory Android is as much as version 15.) The beneficiant learn is that a lot of these apps are in style, so having all of them entrance and middle could be handy. If you usually stream motion pictures on Prime Video, use Amazon Music with a Prime subscription or personal a bunch of Kindle ebooks or Audible audiobooks, all of it’s proper there. You can arrange totally different consumer profiles — additionally not obtainable on an iPad — together with youngster accounts that current a curated collection of kid-friendly web sites and movies. A pretty sturdy set of parental controls allow you to monitor your youngster’s display screen time inside that. You also can name on Alexa and thus management numerous good residence gadgets hands-free, although Amazon has dropped assist for the “Show Mode” that turned the tablet right into a pseudo good show.

You can set up Alexa and all of these Amazon providers on any tablet, although. Most of Fire OS’ precise adjustments suck, and so they have for years now. The app retailer performs a giant half in that. It covers lots of the massive streaming and social media gamers — Netflix, Hulu, TikTok, X, Max, Spotify, Disney+, and many others. — however nonetheless omits all Google apps, Reddit, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Slack, tons of video games and any browser in addition to Amazon’s ultra-basic Silk, amongst many others. The lack of Google stays the largest killer; Amazon’s inventory electronic mail and calendar apps are far much less sturdy than Gmail and Google Calendar, whereas the bootleg YouTube “app” is only a internet shortcut.

It’s true that you just can install the Google Play Store and obtain most of what’s lacking with a hacky workaround, however that’s not the expertise Amazon is promoting (and never one most individuals will decide to do). I can’t reward an OS that works finest while you go behind its again. And as with many Android tablets, lots of the apps which can be supported appear to be blown-up telephone apps greater than experiences designed with a bigger display screen in thoughts.

Because it is a tech product launching in 2024, the Fire HD 8 additionally comes with just a few AI-centric features, together with an automatic wallpaper creator, a writing help software and webpage summaries within the Silk Browser. All of those carry out moderately quick, however It’s laborious to name them game-changers: The writing help makes copy sound overly stilted, whereas the webpage summaries strip down most articles of their nuances (I encourage you, simply learn the put up.) The DALL-E-style wallpaper generator is neater, providing totally different kinds and responding effectively to pure language requests, however I can’t get excited over AI artwork when there’s a lot of the actual factor on the market.

More egregious are the advertisements. Oh, so many advertisements. Upon activating the tablet for the primary time, I used to be greeted with a full-screen promo for BetMGM — as a result of what budget-conscious tablet purchaser isn’t seeking to gamble their financial savings away — and have since been bombarded with lockscreen advertisements to purchase Toshiba laborious drives, State Farm insurance coverage and SteelSeries gaming keyboards. Thankfully, you’ll be able to take away these for an additional $15, both upfront or after purchase.

But the spirit of nickel-and-diming you goes past that. The first app you see is “Shop Amazon.” The residence display screen itself is cut up into two sections: For You and Home. The former is a web page stuffed with content material options, a big chunk of that are both sponsored apps, hyperlinks to motion pictures on Prime Video and songs on Amazon Music or calls to subscribe to Amazon providers like Kids+, Luna and Audible. Some of those are free; many others are paid. At one level, I child you not, it offered me with an advert to purchase a distinct Fire tablet.

The Home tab does have a conventional app grid, however above it’s a “Discover” row that takes up the highest 40 p.c of the display screen and delivers an analogous vary of not-so-personalized options. As I write this, it features a hyperlink to the Prime Video sequence Fallout, the sponsored app “Vita Mahjong for Seniors,” the Max app, hyperlinks to 2 totally different thriller books from the writer Frieda McFadden and some different issues I’ve proven zero curiosity in over my time using Amazon providers.

It’s a jumbled, undignified mess. There’s a definite lack of care to Fire OS, a pervading sense that it doesn’t a lot have your finest curiosity at coronary heart it desires to needle cash-strapped prospects into pumping extra income into the Amazon machine. This simply isn’t the case with iPadOS and even inventory Android. Actually take note of what Fire OS is doing, and it turns into tough to see Fire tablets as something however backed advert platforms Amazon can seed in properties on the cheap. If you desire a product that treats you with just a little extra respect, it’s a must to pay for it.

Wrap-up

I get it, a few of us simply want to avoid wasting money. And Amazon, pretty or not (i.e., not), can considerably undercut most different decent budget tablets on value. If value is your number-one concern, you solely desire a tablet for informal media consumption and you may dwell with the unfiltered Amazon-ness of Fire OS, there’s nonetheless worth available right here. Little in regards to the Fire HD 8 is nice, however a lot of it’s nice for the worth, and when that value is as bananas-cheap as $55 with deals, that’s most likely sufficient. So it goes. Just make sure that the slate is on sale earlier than you make the leap. Otherwise, I’d take into account the ten.1-inch Fire HD 10, which has the identical software annoyances however a sharper, roomier show, extra CPU energy and a contact extra battery life. Either manner, right here’s hoping Fire OS turns into much less user-hostile someday.