While the display isn’t the best of any tablet, the quality of the screen is impressive, especially for the price. The narrow design means you can fit the tablet in the pocket of your jeans (though I don’t recommend you do that). The screen seems well designed for reading books and watching movies. The Fire HD 8 has an 8″ screen that’s long and narrow. This latest version of Amazon’s Fire line of tablets offers a lot of features for a low price. If you’re looking to get a high quality tablet without spending a lot, check out the Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet. I just received the Fire HD 8 Plus from Amazon, so a review of that upgraded model is coming soon.The estimated reading time for this post is 8 minutes You still can't open Assistant by holding down the home button or saying "OK Google" like you can on other Android devices, but if you install the Assistant app from the Play Store after downloading the Google app, you can at least open Assistant from the home screen. Installing Gboard (or SwiftKey, or another keyboard) goes a long way to making the Fire tablet feel more versatile, since the built-in keyboard lacks standard features like swipe typing, emoji search, and GIF input.ĭownloading the Google app from the Play Store also unlocks two additional features: the ability to auto-fill passwords in apps from your Google account (once you change the autofill provider in the Fire OS settings), and running Google Assistant. I also installed Google's default keyboard application from the Play Store, Gboard, which seems to be just as fast as the Fire OS keyboard. If you don't use those services, that might become annoying over time.Īt the starting price of $80, the new Fire HD 8 is firmly in the "good enough" category, and that's all most people want from a seven-inch tablet.įrom left to right: Gboard, Google Assistant, and the Google app Even if you pay extra for the Fire HD 8 without ads (or pay Amazon later to remove them), the home screen still has tabs for Kindle books, Prime Video, and Audible downloads. It's better than it used to be, but every aspect of the system is still an advertisement for Amazon products. There are also plenty of cases and screen protectors already available, which you can't say for most of the white-label Android tablets in this price range. It handles media playback, games, and web browsing without a problem, and the USB Type-C port is a nice upgrade from previous Fire HD 8 tablets. The new Fire HD 8 isn't a hardware powerhouse, but for $90, there's not a whole lot missing that you could reasonably expect at this price point. Should you buy it? Rating 8/10 Amazon Fire HD 8 (10th Gen, 2020) I also installed the F-Droid app store, so I could download a few of my favorite open-source apps that weren't available on Amazon's store. If you want to check if certain apps are available on the Fire HD 8 before buying it, have a look through the Appstore website. The general selection is more limited than the Play Store, but most of the major media streaming platforms and communication tools are available, and there of course a lot of games. Unlike most Android devices, you get the Amazon Appstore for downloading apps and games, instead of the Google Play Store. There is some missing functionality - the custom DNS setting introduced in Pie isn't available, and Amazon's home screen launcher doesn't seem to support app shortcuts - but most of the functionality that doesn't directly rely on Google services is present. That's a nice upgrade from the Android 7.1-based system on the previous Fire HD 8 tablet, since it includes better battery life (due to more background restrictions), support for notification channels, more explicit permissions for apps, and Picture-in-Picture support for video. This tablet comes with Fire OS 7 out of the box, which is based on Android 9 Pie.
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