Amazon’s latest own-brand Fire tablets look cheap, but are they any good?
When the iPad first came out, there were debates about whether it was intended for creation or consumption. All you could do with it was gawp at things and play silly games, said the doubters. But look at all the office software, music tools, photo- and video-editing, art, education and more, said its fans, as all of those apps began to appear. Once MPs, doctors and airline pilots were being equipped with iPads as standard, the argument was won. Tablets aren’t just for watching stuff on the internet.
Yet here’s Amazon with a new range of tablets just for watching stuff on the internet. Specifically, ebooks, videos and apps that you buy from Amazon’s online store or get ‘free’ with an Amazon Prime subscription. Free, in this case, means £79 a year. As well as one-day delivery on most physical purchases, that gets you access to a large collection of films and TV episodes and a catalogue of music.
You’re not forced to sign up for Prime, but that’s what Amazon hopes you’ll do. So it wants to sell you a cheap tablet that’ll last long enough for you to renew your £79 subscription. All of these tablets feel able to survive a few tumbles, as long as the screen doesn’t hit the floor first: you don’t get supertough glass at these prices.
Fire Kids Edition tablet
Addressing that concern, the £100 Fire Kids Edition is guaranteed against everything, including butterfingers and fingers smeared with butter. If you or your little ones smash it up within two years, Amazon will hand you a new one, no questions asked. To help ensure it doesn’t have to, it provides a brightly coloured rubber case, available in pink or blue. This guarantee is partly the reason you’re paying twice the price of the 7in tablet that lives inside.
It also covers one year of ‘Fire for Kids Unlimited’, which lets you download thousands of ebooks, educational apps and games, and watch a selection of children’s TV shows, at no extra cost. After 12 months, you’ll pay £3.99 a month to keep this up. Subscribe to Prime – not included – and that goes down to £1.99. There’s just no escaping the fact that Amazon is offering you low prices now to take your money later.
Although many parents will prefer to supervise younger kids directly, Amazon provides options to control what they can and can’t do. It’s also planning a childfriendly web browser so they can freely surf vetted sites.
Fire tablet
With its 7in screen, the £50 Amazon Fire is smaller than an iPad mini. It’s not particularly thin or light, but does feel robust, and the matt plastic is comfortable to hold. The first compromise you’ll notice is the display, which is dull and grainy. The 2-megapixel main camera is more like the quality we’d expect from a webcam, and with no flash it barely works indoors.
In use, the Fire’s processor is so slow you have to wait for it to respond to your taps and swipes. Amazon had a perverse sense of humour when it called its web browser Silk: smooth it ain’t. When we played fancy games like Hearthstone they kept stuttering to a halt. This is a basic tablet for basic tasks.
At eight hours 43 minutes of video playback, battery life was enough to get us through a day. The built-in 8GB of storage will fill up in no time, especially if you take advantage of the free apps from Prime or Kids Unlimited, but the Fire’s microSD slot means you can expand it: a 32GB card will cost you about £10 from, you’ve guessed it, Amazon. They really aren’t daft, are they?
Fire HD tablet
The two larger models, at eight and 10 inches, have a screen resolution of 1280x800, enough for 720p HD video, but well short of 1080p Full HD. Again, it looks coarse. The widescreen format is unwieldy to hold, and web pages feel either too wide or too narrow.
Thanks to their slippery metal construction, these tablets are skinnier than the 7in Fire. The rear camera has five megapixels and can shoot 1080p video, but it’s still poor. The biggest difference is a faster processor. Browsing web pages and playing games felt less of a struggle, but switching between apps still represented something of a challenge. Continuous video playback ran down the battery in just over nine hours.
It’s hard to justify the £170 price tag of the Fire HD 10. Google’s Nexus 9 may be older and slightly smaller, but for only a little more money it offers smoother performance, much longer battery life, and an ultra-sharp screen, like the iPad Air, in the more practical 4:3 format. The only catch is that its 16GB of storage can’t be supplemented with a microSD card.
The £129 Fire HD 8 is more appealing. Although it only has 8GB built in (16GB costs extra), you get the microSD slot and the same processor and camera at a lower price, and the screen resolution looks better at this size. The tablet is easier to hold, and you don’t seem to sacrifice any battery life compared to the 10in.
Software
A Prime subscription includes Amazon Underground (www.snipca.com/18193), which makes hundreds of paid-for apps free, including in-app purchases. These are mostly games, including favourites like Fruit Ninja, Goat Simulator (yes, really) and Monument Valley. Beyond this, the range of apps is limited. Although Amazon’s operating system, Fire OS, is based on Google’s Android, it doesn’t come with the Google Play app store. Apps like Microsoft Office, available for Android and iPad, aren’t compatible, and the hardware isn’t powerful enough for more ambitious tasks.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 8.9in came with Mayday, which let you video-chat with a tech-support person. That’s not included with these models, but you can phone Amazon and they can demonstrate things remotely on your screen.
The Fire is undeniably the cheapest tablet worth buying, but be aware of its limitations. The HD versions face stiffer competition, and Amazon’s commercial tie-ins could soon start to grate. If videos and games are your thing, though, they’re worth a look.
VERDICT
A step down in price is always welcome, but this feels like a step back for tablets.
SPECIFICATIONS
Fire and Fire Kids Edition: 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek processor • 8GB flash storage • 7in 1024x600-pixel touchscreen • 2-megapixel rear camera • 0.3-megapixel webcam • 802.11n Wi-Fi • microSD card slot • 191x115x10.6mm (HxWxD) • 313g (405g with case) • One-year warranty (two years for Kids Edition)
Fire HD 8/10: 1.5GHz quad-core MediaTek processor • 8GB/16GB flash storage • 8in/10.1in 1280x800- pixel touchscreen • 5-megapixel rear camera • 0.9-megapixel webcam • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • microSD card slot • 214x128x7.7mm/262x159x7.7mm • 311g/432g • One-year warranty