With baked-in Alexa smarts and a tempting price, is Amazon’s mid-size slate a budget sensation?
Update: the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2018) is no longer the most recent device in its line, as in May 2020 Amazon unveiled a newer Fire HD 8 alongside a Fire HD 8 Plus and Fire HD 8 Plus Kids‘ Edition.
These newer tablets have improved internal specs including a modern chipset and increased RAM, and the Plus has even more RAM as well as wireless charging. We’ll review these newer tablets and see if they’re worth your money, but for now our review of the older Fire HD 8 continues below:
Making a great tablet is no easy task. Moving on from their initial sales boom post-2010, slates have begun to coalesce into a number of discrete segments – with the ‘tablet’ in its purest sense disappearing at a rapid pace.
For the power users who want a tablet which doubles as a computer, there’s the Microsoft Surface Pro X and other Surface slates. Those who are invested in the Apple ecosystem will get a lot of mileage from the likes of the iPad Pro 11, and Google is still trying to figure out how to make Android click with the form factor.
In the midst of this, Amazon has carved its own niche by manufacturing and selling bucketloads of lower-specification, bargain-priced slates to the masses.
The base model runs at $79.99/£79.99 and offers 1.5GB of RAM, an 800 x 1280 screen, 16GB of storage and an unspecified quad-core 1.3GHz chipset.
It comes with lock screen adverts by default (costing $15/£10 to remove) and Amazon’s own custom version of Android – which may be a good or a bad thing depending both on your outlook and purchasing habits.
Then there’s the new ‚Show‘ dock, which allows your new tablet to serve as a relatively cut-price Alexa device, should you wish to introduce a smart speaker to your home.
With this in mind, is the value promised in this budget package worth the hype? Or were too many corners cut in the production?
The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2018) is available now direct from Amazon in the US and UK for $79.99 / £59.99 (around AU$110). Amazon still sells the previous generation of tablets, so be sure to check you’re buying the 8th generation that was released in 2018.
That price above is for a 16GB model, but you can also get a 32GB one for $109.99 / £99.99 (roughly AU$155) or add a ‘Show’ charging dock to either version for more money still. You also have to pay an extra $15/£10 if you want a version without lock screen adverts. Still, whatever version you choose this is a cheap tablet.
What marks the 8th generation of the Fire tablets above all those which have come before is the optional inclusion of the ‘Show’ dock.
