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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.
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Amazon Fire HD 8 review: Screen and camera 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. The screen surround is so wide that I initially thought Amazon had sent across the wrong tablet, and it feels chunky.
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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.
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Keep your sights low, though, and install only basic and puzzle-based games, and you’ll be okay. It’s not a particularly accomplished gaming device either, returning a sluggish average of 7.1fps in the GFXBench onscreen Manhattan test, which runs at the screen’s native resolution of 800 x 1,280. 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.īest tablets in 2018: The best tablets to buy this year 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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s the latter camp that the new Amazon Fire HD 8 falls into: an 8in tablet that costs just £80, that’s about as far from modern tablets such as the Apple iPad Pro 9.7 as it’s possible to get.Īmazon followers might feel like they’ve seen this product somewhere before, and they’d be right.
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