Amazon Fire HD 8 and 8 Plus Review (2022): Unrivaled Value | WIRED

As much as I dislike Amazon as a company—nay, as a cultural force—I find the company’s cheap tablets strangely compelling. Fire tablets are one of the best values out there, and the new Fire HD 8 is no exception.

Note, though, that I said “value.” It’s not the fastest, the fanciest, or the sturdiest, but for the price, the Fire HD 8 is a good choice for those that are all-in on Amazon content. The Fire HD 10 remains a more versatile tablet, but the smaller 8-inch models are worth a look if you don’t want to spend that much.

What’s Right

Photograph: Amazon

Amazon has not messed much with the design of the Fire HD 8. The 2022 version looks identical to the previous model, but is a little thinner and lighter. Like the previous model, the all-plastic construction is surprisingly sturdy. I’ve dropped my old Fire HD 8 from about waist height (I’m around 6 feet tall) on a hardwood floor several times without doing any damage. That said, I don’t recommend testing this feature yourself. A glass screen is still a glass screen. I suggest wrapping your Fire HD 8 in a cover of some sort.

The 2.0 GHz hexa-core processor is new, and in my testing was marginally faster than the previous version. Amazon claims the new Fire HD 8 is 30 percent faster. In my experience using them side by side for tasks like browsing the web or playing video, you won’t notice a huge difference. Considered on its own, let’s charitably say that this is not a speedy tablet. It gets the job done, but put it up against just about any other Android tablet on the market and it’s going to lose. Again though, it’s fast enough to do what it’s designed to do, which is deliver Amazon content.

That Amazon content lands on an 8-inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, which is … not great. It’s the sort of thing that would send David Lynch into fits, but it works well enough if you don’t care that much about deep rich colors and solid blacks. Pixelation is still painfully visible in text, but no worse than any other tablet at this price.

The Fire HD 8 is available with either 32 GB or 64 GB of storage—the more the better, if you can afford it. You can expand that storage capacity up to 1 TB using the microSD card slot.

One of the highlights of the Fire HD 8 is the impressive battery life. Amazon touts 13 hours. I only managed 10 or so hours while streaming video, but that’s still very good. The downside is that charging is slow. The included 5-watt charger took so long that I went and found a 15-watt charger. With the 15-watt, I was able to recharge it in under three hours. Still not fast, but better than the included charger, which you’d most likely want to use for overnight charging.