See also: Best budget tablets you can buy right now UPDATE: As of 2 June 2016, the Fire HD 10 is also available in a rather attractive silver aluminium casing (just on the back) which gives it a premium feel at the same price of £169.99. View it here. As usual, this is the base price, so you’ll have to put up with adverts on the lock screen unless you opt to pay an extra £10 when ordering. And you’ll get only 8GB of storage unless you pony up an additional £20 for an extra 8GB. (With the HD 10, the base model is 16GB, and it’s £30 to upgrade to the 32GB model, while the 64GB rounds off the range at £229.99). Cases start from £29.99, rising to £39.99 for the leather versions. Third party cases are also available cheaper, but we’d imagine most people will want to show off the bright back panel and not bother with a fitted case. As long as you’re not expecting premium iPad-style build quality, you won’t be disappointed. Like certain other tablets, and the iPhone 5C, the HD 8 is unashamedly plastic. It’s available in glossy orange, magenta and blue finishes, or black if you prefer a more understated approach.
The HD 10 doesn’t have the outlandish colour options, with a choice of either black or white.
Under the HD 8’s plastic is a metal frame, and the result is a striking tablet that feels solid and sturdy despite its slim 7.7mm thickness and light weight of 311g. The HD is quite obviously heavier, but 432g is very light for a 10.1in tablet: the 9.7in iPad Air 2 weighs 437g. Just like the 7in Fire, the HD 8 and HD 10 have all their ports and buttons on the top edge. Stereo speakers reside on the left-hand edge, or the bottom if you’re holding it sideways to watch a video or play a game. They’re pretty loud, too, and certainly better than the Fire’s mono speaker. In fact, they’re almost certainly better than any smartphone speakers, and the Dolby Audio logo doesn’t harm that company’s reputation unlike some similar logos we’ve seen on laptops. Front and rear cameras are slightly better too, although they don’t justify the price hike from the 7in model. More on those later. You also get a slightly faster quad-core processor, running at (up to) 1.5GHz instead of 1.3GHz. Screen resolution is higher, too, but again it’s nothing to get excited about. The 1280×800-pixel screen gives an adequate 189ppi (common on tablets as far back as 2012), but we’ve seen better at this price – notably the no-longer-on-sale Tesco Hudl 2. Image quality is good, though, with vibrant colours and good viewing angles. It’s laminated, too, so there’s a solid feel when you tap, and the image appears right at the surface as opposed to sunken some way below as you get with lesser, non-laminated screens. If you’d prefer a Full HD screen, it isn’t too difficult to hunt down a Nexus 7 (2013 model) or an LG G Pad 8.3. Internal storage is limited to 8- or 16GB but there’s a microSD slot for adding more, up to 128GB. You can do that on the 7in Fire, too, but the HD 8 has upgraded Wi-Fi: dual-band 802.11ac. For most people, the difference will be negligible, not least because 802.11ac routers still aren’t too common. Like the screen’s resolution, performance is best described as adequate. It’s better than the £49 Fire, but it’s not as good as a premium tablet. So pretty much what you’d expect, really. It’s fine for casual games, browsing the web or photos, watching catch-up TV and sending emails. Games which use the tablet’s full processing power will obviously drain the battery the quickest, and if you stick the screen to full brightness (which isn’t blindingly bright) you’ll be lucky to get more than four continuous hours of use. We’ve covered the hugely updated Fire OS 5 – codename Bellini – in our Fire review, so do read that if you want more detail.
Flip to the Apps home screen and the search bar label changes to ‘Search Apps’. But type in ‘Skype’ and you end up looking at some Bing results (there’s no Google, remember) instead of being taken to the Appstore to download Skype. To do that, you have to tap on the shopping cart, labelled Store. You can get BBC iPlayer, the new ITV Hub, All 4, Demand 5 and even the UKTV Play app which lets you catch up on shows from Dave, Yesterday, Really and Drama. Holes become evident if you have smart home products you want to control, although you’re in luck if you have a Hive thermostat or a Fitbit. If you get stuck, the Mayday service means you can get support directly on the tablet, and if you have kids, there’s great parental controls when you use the Fire For Kids app. A handy new feature – for late night use – is Blue Shade. This cuts out the blue light which LCD screens emit and which is said to prevent you falling asleep quickly. You can choose a colour from ‘red candlelight’ to ‘yellow moonlight’. It’s something we wish other devices had built in as standard. The camera app has a simple, easy-to-use interface and advises when you need to enable HDR in situations where there’s high contrast. You’ll see this a lot, but switching on HDR means it takes a couple of seconds to capture and process multiple shots, so you need to keep the tablet still. Unfortunately, no matter what you do, photos look pretty terrible. Saying they lack detail and sharpness is an understatement. Below is a full, original unedited photo from the HD 8 which appears to show heavy-handed compression which wipes out a lot of detail so that the brickwork of St Pancras is just a smudgy mess. (Click to enlarge.)
Here’s a 100 percent crop so you can see what we’re talking about:
The HDR mode does improve the exposure – and creates a file roughly 50 percent larger – but the same flaws in image quality remain. Video is shot at 720p by default, but another toggle switches to 1080p. There’s no stabilisation, which isn’t surprising, but quality is still below par. The same criticisms apply: a general lack of detail and sharp focus. Making things worse is the lack of an HDR option. The severely limited dynamic range made our video (below) appear to have been taken at dusk, when it was in fact broad daylight, albeit winter daylight. Plus, exposure changes are slow and jarring. Overall, it’s a dismal failure of a camera.
The front camera has a 0.9Mp sensor and is fine for Skype but selfies are grainy and not all that flattering. Jim has been testing and reviewing products for over 20 years. His main beats include VPN services and antivirus. He also covers smart home tech, mesh Wi-Fi and electric bikes.
