The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) is a super-affordable tablet. It's not really meant for people who pine for the latest Android update, or check out every hot new game going.
It's for those who want to spend as little as possible on a tablet, without ending up with trash they'll regret buying when they realize quite how compromised it is.
The new Fire HD 8 isn't a big upgrade over the last Fire HD 8, it's actually worse in some respects. However, it's significantly cheaper too, as it costs $89.99/£89.99 (around AU$120), making it $60/£40 (roughly AU$80) less than the older generation.
Its sheer value is hard to argue with, particularly when the similarly-spec'd Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 retails for $199 (around £160/AU$265). And that's if you can even get it - in the UK you'll only usually find the lesser 7-inch Tab A, at £129 (around $160/AU$210).
The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) is far from a perfect tablet, but it's easily the best you can get at the price without rolling the dice on a no-brand Chinese import, which is a dangerous game.
Key features
Very cheap
Heavily tied to Amazon's services
This is an 8-inch tablet with a widescreen display aspect, making the Fire HD 8 (2016) more of a rectangle shape than an iPad. That's one minor thing to consider if you're looking for something iPad-like for less cash, as the HD 8's style is a little different.
The whole experience is different to that of an iPad too. This is not a super-powered, perfecto-performance tablet.
Amazon has done its best to pack as much as it can into the Fire HD 8 (2016) without losing money with each one it sells, but it's not selling a $300/£250/AU$400-grade device for this price. The slate doesn't feel expensive, and the camera is very bad.
However, the HD 8 (2016) will let you do almost everything you'd want to do with a tablet, including trying out thousands of games and apps, with a somewhat similar selection to what you'd get on a normal Android tablet.
The Amazon Fire HD 8 isn't really a normal tablet, though, and that's part of why it's so cheap. Amazon uses these tablets as a way to push you its services. Its store is a core part of the interface, and so are Amazon's other digital services, like its Amazon Instant Video Netflix-a-like service.
The lowest price versions also show you ads on the lock screen, which Amazon calls Special Offers, although you can cut these out if you're willing to pay a little extra.
There's no obligation to sign up to Amazon Prime when you buy the Fire HD 8, but you'll want to do so to squeeze as much as possible out of the little thing. The tablet slowly creeps Amazon's platforms further into your life, and that may annoy some of you. Its software is also much less plain and much busier than other tablets.
However, if you can live with this the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) is a bargain.
Design and display
Low quality screen
Cheap but colorful design
The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) is a fairly small Android tablet. You could think of it as a tablet for kids, or one for adults who want something they can hold in one hand while taking the train to work.
Looking at it, you might wonder which way around it's meant to go. Amazon itself is ambivalent about this. The logo on the rear suggests it's an 'upright' tablet, but the buttons are laid out along the top (or right when it's on its side) to make it easy to change volume while you watch a movie.
Like 2015's Fire HD tablets, it's not flashy and is all-plastic aside from the sheet of glass covering its screen, but it feels reasonably solid. The plastic back flexes a bit at its center, making the back panel knock into what is probably the battery if you press down with your finger, but it's sturdier from the front, as you have to press fairly hard to cause any kind of screen distortion.
One failing of a lot of other ultra-cheap tablets is that they feel quite poorly-made, even some aluminum tablets. This one's build feels prosaic but competent, and you can be sure that returning it if something does go wrong will be much easier than with a no-brand import.
Amazon also lets you sidestep the "boring black rectangle" effect of most cheap tablets, offering a bunch of different shades. The blue one Amazon sent us has a slightly textured matt finish, the plastic equivalent of anodized aluminum. You can also get the Fire HD 8 (2016) in tangerine, magenta and black.
It's 9.2mm thick, which is thicker than the 7.7mm old model, and at 341g it's a bit heavier than the 313g Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0. These differences don't really matter when the new Fire HD 8 is substantially cheaper than both, though, and the extra thickness is partly down to battery improvements.
The part that impresses us most is something that may sound quite boring at first: storage. There's 16GB as standard, where the much more expensive Samsung tablet only has 8GB. You can upgrade to a chunky 32GB for an extra $30/£20 (around AU$40), and there's a microSD slot on the side too.
The Fire HD 8 (2016) is one of the most generous budget tablets for storage, and that's pretty neat.
One thing that's distinctly compromised by the low price though is the screen. It's OK, it's passable, but it's also why the real tech-heads among you may want to give the Fire HD 8 (2016) a miss.
The screen is eight inches across and uses an IPS LCD panel. These two points are fine, but the screen architecture and resolution are dated.
1280 x 800 pixels across an 8.0-inch display isn't the block-fest it appears on a 10-inch screen, but it's a world away from the sharpness of the iPad mini 4. You'll notice this most in text, which looks a bit soft and fuzzy. The interface uses clever text smoothing to reduce this effect, but third-party apps generally don't.
Calling this tablet HD is somewhat disingenuous, if not exactly untrue. 720p is an "HD" resolution, after all, and this one is slightly 'over' 720p. Given that some much more expensive tablets still have just 1280 x 800 resolutions, it would be unreasonable to expect anything more.
What we'd like to see Amazon improve next year is the structure of the screen. In an advanced screen its various layers are fused together, making the screen appear very close to perfect black when it's off. Even in a fairly poorly-lit room, the Fire HD 8's screen looks quite gray, though.
This reduces perceived contrast significantly and worsens effective viewing angles. In a dimly-lit room the display colors look fairly good for a tablet so cheap, but the Fire HD 8 (2016)'s display is not likely to impress the pickier tech-head.
However, given the price it's perfectly good. We expected the tablet to be almost unusable in bright sunlight, but good top brightness actually makes the screen hold up surprisingly well. We took it out to a local park to take some photos during testing, and while you wouldn't want to watch a movie in such conditions, you can at least see what's going on on-screen.
Interface and reliability
Very different from stock Android
Pushes Amazon's shops and services
Doesn't have Google Play
If there's one bit that might put you off the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016), it's the software. It's not bad, it's just very different.
At its core this is an Android tablet, but its top layer is an Amazon-made interface that radically alters the software. In Android, you get home screens, which are like rooms in a house. You can decorate them as you like.
The Fire HD 8 has home screens, but almost all of them are given over to Amazon's digital services. Amazon curates them, not you. There's one for the Kindle bookstore, one for Amazon Instant Video, another for Audible and one for the Amazon store itself.
You can't get rid of these, they're there to stay. Unless you get the Fire HD 8 (2016) without 'Special offers' you'll even see an Amazon ad every time you unlock the tablet too. This is an interface built on bloat.
However, the 'storefront' home screens are fairly easy to ignore day-to-day. The first home screen you'll see when booting up the tablet or exiting an app is a simple page of app icons you can move around and arrange into folders: much more Android-like.
To the left of this screen is a page of recently used apps, the rest of the interface is all about making you consume more. More apps, more video, more books. Amazon is the pusher man of the digital age, desperate to get you hooked on its wares. Or at least get to you sign up for an Amazon Prime account.
The company goes as far as replacing the Google Play app store too, as Amazon has its own, called simply the Appstore. Its catalogue isn't quite as vast as that of Google Play, but it offers a few unusual incentives.
Amazon Underground is a part of the Appstore that offers games, for free, that would normally cost you cash on Google Play. The way it works is Amazon actually pays the developers for every minute you play a game, and in return Amazon gets some of your data.
Underground isn't for privacy freaks, but if you use Amazon then the company probably already knows an inordinate amount about you anyway.
The Amazon Appstore also uses a coin system that lets you earn store credit by playing certain games. Amazon is desperate to get you invested and involved in its services.
The Amazon Fire OS style is more polarizing than iOS or Android. This is a much more directed experience, but it is also a very full and rich ecosystem that tallies well with what people actually do with tablets. They noodle about with apps, play games, read some articles, and in some cases read novels.
Think carefully about whether this software, known as Fire OS, will get on your nerves.
The less subjective issue is performance. While not a mess, the interface feels significantly slower than the latest version of Android. Transitions are often a little juddery and it just takes that bit longer to get things done because there's so much more going on.
Movies, music and gaming
Screen isn't great for video
Good gaming performance
Weak speakers
Let's dig a bit deeper into the media side of the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016). Its main movie portal is Amazon Instant Video, which is a bit like Netflix but is usually accessed through a Prime subscription rather than a standalone sub. But it also lets you pay for some movies that aren't part of the Prime service, including a lot of new films and many older ones that aren't in the Prime library.
Thanks to the way licensing works, Amazon can't just lump every movie in existence in the 'free to stream' selection. Sorry.
There's also a simple app to play locally stored videos, and the Appstore has several of the most popular Android media players too, including MX Player.
The main thing holding the Fire HD 8 (2016) back as a mini movie machine is the screen. Feed it a quality 720p film and it looks good, but the poor contrast panel means it's closer to one of those airplane seat screens than a true high-end tablet.
This affects games too, and we found ourselves cranking up the brightness to combat screen reflectivity even indoors.
Gaming performance is surprisingly good though, despite the low-end CPU, precisely because of the slate's low screen resolution. High-end games like Asphalt 8 and Riptide GP2 run as well as they do on a much, much more expensive tablet, they just look worse thanks to the lower-quality, lower-resolution screen.
We also tried casual title Genies & Gems to try to earn some Amazon coins, and found that colorful casual games look pretty good on the Fire HD 8 (2016). It's generally 3D titles that reveal the slightly low pixel density most clearly.
In other words, it's a pretty great little budget gaming tablet. It's not so hot if you want the very latest games, though, as the selection is categorically worse here than on Google Play. For example, the Red Dwarf XI game just came out on Android, but it's not available through Amazon yet.
Amazon has taken a step back on speaker quality too. Some of the last batch of Fire HD tablets had surprisingly beefy speakers, but the Amazon Fire HD 8's are ultra-thin and bass-free. There are two speaker drivers that sit on the bottom (when held in landscape) for a stereo effect, but they're simply not very good. You'll want to use headphones or a separate speaker whenever possible.
The treble is quite clear and you can max-out the volume without causing distortion, but the speakers don't go all that loud.
Specs and benchmark performance
Reasonable benchmark results
As much power as we'd expect for the money
The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) has a MediaTek CPU, the less trendy rival to Qualcomm's Snapdragon series. It's an MT8163 chipset, which has four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.3GHz and the dual-core version of the Mali T720 GPU, matched with 1.5GB of RAM.
This is not a high-end spec and the Fire HD 8 (2016) would be in trouble if it used anything less powerful, but Amazon knows what it's doing here. It's enough power to make everything run well on the 800p screen, just not quite enough to offset the ever-so-slightly sluggish Amazon software. But that's an issue of optimization and software design for the most part.
In Geekbench 3 multi-core tests the tablet scores a very respectable, for the price, 1900 points. That's up from a multi-core result of just 1506 from the previous model, though well below say, the iPad mini 2, which scored 2220.
Battery life
Doesn't live up to Amazon's battery life claims
Charges slowly
Amazon says the Fire HD 8 (2016) will last for up to 12 hours. However, it didn't do that well in our regular battery test, which involves playing a 720p MP4 file that lasts for 90 minutes, at maximum screen brightness.
This took 29% off the battery, suggesting the slate will last for five hours of video. This is not great, but bear in mind it will last longer with the screen brightness reduced. You will want to use maximum brightness for any outdoor viewing, though.
The bigger, or at least more irritating, problem is charging speed. It's slow. Using a very basic adaptor with only 1A of current, charging from flat takes 5-6 hours in our experience. You won't find tablets that charge in a half-hour or so yet, but this is a particularly slow one.
Camera
Terrible cameras
Effective HDR mode
Given the Fire HD 8's price, it's no surprise the cameras are poor. The one on the back has a 2MP sensor, and is almost certainly designed to take pictures that are only going to be viewed on the tablet's screen.
As soon as you zoom into any image, it starts to look soft, blurry or pixelated because the resolution is so low.
Image quality is very poor too. Unless you have one of the worst phones currently available, its camera will decimate the image quality of the Fire HD 8 (2016). The tablet has a reasonably effective HDR mode, but it amounts to polishing a turd. This is one of the worst cameras in a new mobile device this year.
We don't blame Amazon for this, though. It's a sensible way to lower the Fire HD 8's price and is a very good thing to sacrifice. We'd rather have 16GB storage (rather than 8GB) than a better tablet camera.
The front camera is bad too. It has a VGA sensor, the lowest of the low. It gives something for kids to muck about with, though, and that's really the main thing. Quality isn't really the aim.
Camera samples
Verdict
The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) is the best tablet you can get at the price. That alone secures it a recommendation.
This is not a technological upgrade over the last Fire HD 8, but it takes the last version's most important bits and lowers the price significantly by degrading a few of the less important parts.
If you're a true gadget lover, you might want to consider spending a bit more on something with a better screen and more flexible software. However, if you're happy to fit yourself into the Amazon system and can put up with the budget parts, this is an excellent buy.
Who's this for?
The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) is for people who want a cheap tablet. That's it. If you only have £90/$90 to spend on a tablet, you can't do better than this right now. And there are no signs that's going to change any time soon.
Only buy this tablet if you're willing to get on with the way Amazon tablets roll, though. They're not like other slates.
Should you buy it?
If you want a cheap tablet at this price, go ahead. Samsung, LG and Sony have nothing to offer that's worth considering.
However, if you've read every page of this review and care about things like camera, audio and screen quality, you should probably spend a bit more. There's nothing remotely near the price we can recommend, though. Low cost tablets have been treading water for years.
If your demands are higher, look for an Asus ZenPad S 8.0 or a good deal on a refurbished or second-hand iPad mini 2.
Competition
There aren't many alternatives that are quite as affordable as the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016), but there are a few options you might want to consider.
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7.0
The tablet closest in price you'll find from Samsung is the Galaxy Tab A, the 7-inch version. And it's still a lot more expensive than the Fire HD 8 (2016). It also has far less storage at just 8GB.
Its benefits include much better cameras and a much more conventional take on Android. It has Samsung's own interface, but that looks and feels much closer to the Android standard.
If they were sold at the same price, we'd probably recommend the Samsung, but they're not. The Galaxy Tab A 7.0 costs 50% more, highlighting the key to the Fire HD 8's appeal.
Amazon Fire
We're talking about the bog-standard Amazon Fire tablet here, which is even cheaper than the Fire HD 8 (2016). It's not a terrible tablet, but it is even more compromised.
Screen resolution is lower, and even though the display is smaller, the lower pixel density leaves it looking a bit more pixelated.
Its design is also dumpier, looking relatively dated because the screen bezels are larger. Also consider that to get the HD 8-matching 16GB version you need to pay a little extra. If you're going to use a tablet quite a lot, the HD 8 upgrade is worth it.
Read our full Amazon Fire review
Lenovo Tab3 7
At the time of writing, we've only had a quick look at the Lenovo Tab3 7, but it's one of the obvious alternatives to the HD 8. It's also slightly cheaper.
However, just like the baseline Amazon Fire, it's also a lesser tablet. A 7-inch, lower resolution screen will make it worse for gaming. It also only has 1GB of RAM, which may cause some basic performance issues.
The main reason to consider it is because it has a more conventional take on Android, using Google Play and Google's apps rather than third-party alternatives.
Read our hands on Lenovo Tab3 7 review
First reviewed: October 2016
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