Last year’s Amazon Fire HD 8 was a fairly decent cut-price tablet, but it struggled to stand out against its even cheaper Fire 7 sibling, or indeed Amazon’s larger Fire HD 10. This year, though, Amazon’s revamped its 8in Fire tablet, giving it more storage and more powerful internals.
Whereas last year’s model was hamstrung by just 8GB of storage, the new Fire HD 8 now comes in 16GB and 32GB models, which can be expanded up to 200GB via microSD. There’s also a new quad-core 1.3GHz chip inside, as well as 1.5GB of RAM.
At first glance, it looks a lot like last year’s Fire HD 8. It’s still a relatively chunky piece of kit, weighing 341g, but at least its thick screen bezel comes in one of four funky colours: black, blue, tangerine or magenta. Despite its girth, it feels very robust and well-suited to the rough and tumble of general home life, particularly if you’re considering buying this for a child. It might be fairly basic in terms of design, but considering it costs just £90 for the basic 16GB version (with special offers, mind – it’s £100 if you don't want adverts on your lockscreen), it’s easily one of the better-made tablets I’ve seen in this price range.
Performance and battery life
Start using the Fire HD 8, however, and it’s clear how Amazon’s managed to keep the cost so low. The quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT8163 processor, for example, isn’t particularly quick, although it should serve you well for the most part. With a Geekbench 3 single-core result of 644 and multi-core result of 1,854, it’s not the best out there, but menu transitions were reasonably smooth, and general navigation didn’t present any major hiccups.
It’s not particularly well equipped for dealing with high-intensity games, though, only managing an average of 7.1fps in GFXBench GL’s onscreen Manhattan 3 test. However, simpler games such as Threes and Temple Run ran perfectly fine, so you should still be able to get in a bit of gaming to while away a long car journey.
Web browsing was reasonably smooth, too, but I saw some noticeable performance dips when scrolling through particularly media-heavy web pages, such as The Guardian. That’s not hugely surprising given its Peacekeeper browser performance score of 568, although it’s certainly not the worst score I’ve seen.
Where the Fire HD 8 really shines, though, is battery life. Setting the screen brightness to our predefined measurement of 170cd/m2, the Fire HD 8 managed 13hrs 4mins of continuous video playback, which is hugely impressive. It’s by far the longest-lasting Fire tablet we’ve seen, surpassing both the Fire HD 10 and Fire 7 by around four hours.
Display
At £90, the Fire HD 8 was never going to have an award-winning screen, so its underwhelming 66% sRGB colour gamut coverage isn’t wholly unexpected. It’s quite a low score, sitting well behind the MediaPad M3 and Iconia Tab 10, but colours were, on the whole, reasonably well balanced and images were neither too warm or too cool, so it’s not quite as disastrous as it might first appear.
Likewise, its 1,280 x 800 resolution might not sound like much, but text is still reasonably crisp and easy to read, and its contrast ratio of 968:1 helps texts stand out against lighter backgrounds. It’s exceedingly bright, too, hitting a high of 455cd/m2. That’s more than enough for using outside, and I was able to see the screen clearly even in the relentless autumn sunshine.
Camera
One thing you won’t be using the Fire HD 8 for is photography. Its 2-megapixel rear camera is a rather token effort from Amazon, and outdoor shots showed a serious lack of detail. Colours were washed out, too, and grain was evident throughout. Turning on HDR makes things even worse, thanks in no small part to the lengthy amount of time it needs to take an image.
There’s no rear flash either, making dark indoor shots near impossible to make out. You’ll have to rely solely on natural light when taking family snaps indoors, but even if you do manage to find good lighting conditions, the Fire HD 8’s high noise levels mean you’d simply be better off using your smartphone.
Fire OS
Like the rest of Amazon’s tablet lineup, the Fire HD 8 runs Amazon’s Fire OS, which is based on Android. It’s not quite as flexible as your typical Android tablet since you’re tied into using Amazon’s dedicated app store, as well as most of its own services such as Amazon Music, Audible audiobooks and Amazon Photos when it comes to media consumption. As a result, anyone knee-deep in an Amazon Prime subscription will probably benefit greatly, but non-Prime customers or those less familiar with Amazon’s services may not find it so open or inviting.
Either way, Fire OS 5.0 is certainly much easier to use compared to previous versions of the OS, as its awkward carousel layout has now been replaced by a more traditional grid system. You still have dedicated tabs such as Home, Books, Video and Games, which also advertise other recommended products to you, but I didn’t find it particularly intrusive. More irksome were the constant barrage of adverts on the lock screen, which I found very irritating each time I turned it on. You might not find this particularly bothersome, but I’d much rather pay an extra £10 to get the ‘Without Special Offers’ version of this tablet and never see them ever again.
We might be seeing proper Alexa integration in the near future, too - Amazon’s cloud-based voice assistant service that can answer questions and perform certain functions every time you bark commands at it. It won’t be always listening for a trigger word like the Amazon Echo, but an upcoming OTA update will eventually allow you to press and hold down the home button to enable voice commands, so I’ll update this review with my impressions as soon as it’s available.
Verdict
Despite its shortfalls, Amazon’s latest Fire HD 8 tablet is quite the tablet. At just £90 for the basic 16GB version, its excellent battery life, superb build quality and decent performance make it a great choice for those looking to save a bit of money, and it’s a particularly good choice for kids. It has its shortcomings, but at this price, you’d be hard-pushed to find a better value Android tablet for less. It wins a Recommended award.
| Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Quad-core 1.3GHz |
| RAM | 1.5GB |
| Screen size | 8in |
| Screen resolution | 1,280 x 800 |
| Screen type | IPS |
| Front camera | VGA |
| Rear camera | 2 megapixels |
| Flash | N/A |
| GPS | N/A |
| Compass | N/A |
| Storage (free) | 16GB (12.09GB) |
| Memory card slot (supplied) | Micro SD (200GB) |
| Wi-Fi | 802.11b/g/n |
| Bluetooth | Yes |
| NFC | N/A |
| Wireless data | N/A |
| Dimensions | 214x128x9.2 |
| Weight | 341g |
| Features | |
| Operating system | FireOS |
| Battery size | 4,750mAh |