The top Fire devices on the market

For those wanting an affordable, compact tablet that’ll do the basics well, the Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus (2020) is a decent option.

We found that while its design did look a little plain and simple with a majorly plastic construction, it offered a durable outer shell that could happily be slung in a bag with no qualms. Its 335g makes this a little on the heavier side for the readers out there, but for most people, it’ll be perfectly fine. In addition, you can also get the Fire HD 8 Plus in a range of pastel colours if the more standard black and white offerings aren’t to your liking.

For its screen, the HD 8 Plus features an 8-inch panel, complete with 800×1200 resolution. We found it to be perfectly usable for video streaming and will pass well for casual viewers with some vibrant colours that will work well for indoor usage. Just note that this is quite a reflective panel, meaning it is not the best for use on a sunny day – we found that even with the brightness cranked all the way up, it was difficult to read content without finding a covered area.

Under the hood, the Fire HD 8 Plus offers passable performance for the price with a quad-core chip and a bump up to 3GB of RAM. The Plus variation of the tablet provides enough capacity to offer a relatively smooth experience when switching between apps. We also found it to help out for casual gaming too, which worked rather well, although don’t expect to be playing anything more intense. A choice of either 32 or 64GB of storage is enough for casual use (and it’s also Micro SD expandable), and a 2MP camera on both the front and back worked fine but results were far below what you’d get on an iPad, let alone a smartphone.

Where the hardware of the HD 8 Plus is mostly serviceable, the software experience is less so. It’s built on a forked version of Android 10 that pumps Amazon content left right and centre, and you won’t find out-of-the-box access to Google’s services either. If you find yourself using Amazon’s services a lot, then this is worthwhile, although if not, you may be forced to look elsewhere.

Battery life here is up to standard, too. During testing, the Fire HD 8 Plus lasted for 12 hours during a typical day of working and gaming, which lives up to Amazon’s own claims. There’s also support for USB-C charging, which is handy, as well as Qi wireless charging with the Plus model, if you don’t happen to have a cable to hand.

Reviewer: Max Parker

Full review: Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus (2020)

The Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus is Amazon’s ‘flagship’ Fire tablet, offering the same core fundamentals of what makes the Fire tablets so popular in a little bit of a larger chassis.

Unlike its smaller siblings, this Amazon tablet doesn’t sport the same usual roughened plastic construction, and opts for a soft-touch back that feels comfortable to hold. This has the disadvantage of offering quite a fair bit of flex in the chassis, which we found noticeable when playing games that involved a virtual gamepad. The bezels here are also fairly large, but for a budget 10-inch tablet, look about right here.

As for performance, during testing, the Fire HD 10 Plus performed pretty well, coming bundled with a MediaTek MT813 processor, as well as a triple-core graphics chipset and 4GB of RAM. For the most part, it’s serviceable and feels a lot more responsive than previous Fire tablets, but once again falls victim to the problem of Amazon’s forked operating system. Fire OS here is less annoying than it used to be, given its UI has been reorganised, but the fact remains that the lack of ‘standard’ Android features such as Google’s suite of apps (Play Store included) severely inhibits the user experience of the Fire HD 10 Plus.

For more of an affordable tablet, the screen on offer with the Fire HD 10 Plus is particularly excellent. It may be a standard 10.1-inch LCD, complete with 1920×1200 resolution, but we also found it to offer some natural colours and especially pleasing vibrancy. That vibrancy comes courtesy of a measured 500 nits of brightness, which is more akin to budget phones with much smaller screens.

The battery life is exceedingly good too, and during testing we found it to last for more than Amazon’s quoted 12 hours. Judging by the minimal battery life, the figure looks closer to 16 hours, and in casual use, we were able to get a full week out of the Fire HD 10 Plus. It charges via USB-C, which is convenient. There is also support for Qi wireless charging if you’re looking for more of a cable-free choice

Reviewer: Andrew Williams

Full review: Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus

If it’s a no-frills large-screen tablet you’re after from Amazon, then look no further than the Amazon Fire HD 10.

The display here, much like the Plus variant of the same tablet, is a 10.1-inch 1080p touchscreen, complete with 1920 x 1200 resolution. We found the screen is suitably sharp and its colours are especially vibrant. This meant viewing videos in HD looked excellent, making this a useful choice for streaming TV and films. That being said, even at full brightness, it did look a little bit dull, and quickly became illegible in bright sunlight, during our checks.

With regards to performance, the Fire HD 10 is powered by an octa-core processor alongside 3GB of RAM that, during testing, we found offers slick enough performance to allow it to browse the internet and stream videos without any noticeable delays. The choice of 32GB or 64GB of storage is handy, as is the fact it’s user-expandable up to 1TB, if you ever need that quantity of storage on an affordable tablet. The cameras here, a 5MP snapper on the back and a 2MP one on the back, offer meagre performance at best, with over-sharpened images from the back camera and selfies from the front that were okay, and for software, the Fire HD 10 features the same Fire OS experience as the others in this list.

The design here is kept simple and functional, with the Fire HD 10 being comprised of a matte plastic that feels rather durable even if it looks a tad cheap, and at 465g, is one of the lighter 10-inch tablets out there, making it easy to carry around. Chunky bezels adorn all four sides of the display, which can make this particular Fire tablet feel more dated than the competition, although the lack of physical buttons sit at odds, and offer more of a modern look.

Battery life here is a little subpar, with the Fire HD 10 only lasting for a little over 7 hours during testing. This contract as Amazon’s own quoted 12 hours of go juice quite severely. On the other hand, we found it to charge quicker than the four hours that Amazon suggests, with the Fire HD 10 going from zero to full in 3.5.

Reviewer: Hannah Davies

Full review: Amazon Fire HD 10

The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2020) is the most basic tablet within Amazon’s range of Fire devices, and for those wanting a device that’ll be great for casual use and no more, this is a useful option.

Its design doesn’t scream that it’s cheap, instead offering a durable, textured frame that we found to be both strong and comfortable to hold. This affordable candidate is also available in a wide variety of colours – our review sample was kitted out in white, which we found to look pretty good overall. The general feel and build quality of the Fire HD 8 is certainly better than a lot of other sub-£100 tablets we’ve tested.

The Fire HD 8’s screen is perfectly usable and comes with a more basic feature set. Jacking up the brightness reveals some decent colours, although with it toned down, they can appear quite low-energy. Furthermore, the screen can be quite reflective, making blacks appear more grey and the 1280 x 800 resolution isn’t the sharpest, either. For the money though, you can’t really expect more.

Inside, you get a MediaTek processor, complete with 2GB of RAM, which is the bare minimum an Android tablet can have without feeling chronically slow. This isn’t the quickest tablet by any means, and there is a fair bit of lag during testing, but it’s still usable for the most basic of tasks. Storage options are either 32 or 64GB, which provide enough space to install a few apps and games. The only other positive we noticed is that the speakers offer loud and clear audio.

As for battery life, we found Amazon’s claims of 12 hours of runtime to largely hold up. Battery drain here is also exemplary for such an affordable device, with an hour’s worth of Netflix also causing the Fire HD 8 to lose 7% of its charge, at 50% brightness. Whack it up to full, and the capacity will drain doubly fast. You do get USB-C charging here, which is a very welcome change from the tired Micro USB port we still find on some tablets at this price point.

Reviewer: Max Parker

Full review: Amazon Fire HD 8 (2020)

Amazon has long been a proponent of tablets bespoke designed for kids’ and the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro is our favourite big-screen version.

For its design, the ‘Pro’ variant includes the Slim case that comes in a variety of colours and patterns and feels durable enough with a decent amount of rubber padding. It may not be the same as the Bumper case on the standard Fire 10, but during our tests we found it offers good all-round protection. Otherwise, the chassis and its construction are similar to that of the Fire HD 10 Plus, complete with relatively solid build quality, some slightly chunky bezels, and a soft-touch back that offers some flex under pressure.

The screen here is more than good enough to suit the needs of children, with sharp-looking text and enough resolution to make Full HD viewing pleasant. This comes alongside some vibrant colours that look as if they should be on a tablet that’s a few times the price of this kid-friendly contender. We measured its brightness to be 444 nits, which is great for an affordable tablet, and means you can use this tablet outside, just as long as you’re not in direct sunlight.

Inside, the Fire HD 10 Kids Pro makes use of an octa-core MediaTek MT8183 processor, complete with 3GB of RAM and a triple-core Mali G-72 graphics chipset. In the real world, we found it to feel responsive and smooth, even if the benchmark scores were a tad middling. 32GB of internal storage is okay for installing some apps, but you may need to lean on the up to 1TB’s worth of microSD storage available for those who want to install loads.

Where other Fire tablets’ software experience is intrinsically limited by the fact they run Fire OS, for the Fire HD 10 Kids Pro this actually one of the tablet’s biggest plus points. There is a narrower choice for apps and games here, but the basics are covered well enough. The Fire HD 10 Kids Pro excels with a vast amount of parental controls that sit behind Fire OS, allowing you to control everything from the time the tablet can’t be used after to time limits in individual app types.

A 6500mAh battery also provided some excellent total run time. During testing, we found the battery drain figures to suggest that the Fire HD 10 Kids Pro will last for a full 165 hours, which sits at 4 hours longer than Amazon’s suggested 12 hours of use. We also found it to need charging every three to four days with regular usage, and for charging, the bundled 9W option will take four hours to go from empty to full.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full review: Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro

The Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Pro is a slightly smaller, more portable version of the Fire HD 10 Kids Pro ideal for those that need something more portable than a 10-inch display for day-to-day use.

Like the Fire HD 10 Kids Pro, the tablet comes with an improved slim case that looks a little sleeker than the standard Kids case, though it’s still just as durable and features a raised lip around the display to help avoid damage to the display. There’s also a handy fold-out handle that makes it a little easier to transport one-handed. Beneath the slim case it’s essentially a Fire HD 8, though with a few child-focused software features.

The 8-inch display doesn’t quite have the same Full HD resolution as its bigger sibling at 1280 x 800, and that’s noticeable when you look up close. However, we felt that it’s not actually a dealbreaker as the resolution is more than enough for watching TV shows and movies, and it’ll be more than sufficient for browsing the web via the built-in Silk browser. It measured in at 477 nits, slightly brighter than its bigger sibling, though the reflective glossy surface means it’s not ideal for outdoor viewing.

Within the Fire HD 8 Kids Pro you’ll find a six-core MediaTek MT8169A CPU with a paltry 2GB of RAM that doesn’t quite deliver the same level of smooth performance of the larger octa-core model, though it’ll suffice for basic apps, games, books and other content from the Kids+ service built into the Fire OS interface. You’ll also get a free one-year subscription to Amazon’s premium kids’ service for your troubles.

There’s also a huge swathe of parental controls that live within the Kid-friendly version of Amazon’s Fire OS, allowing you to control the apps and websites they can access down to the amount of time they can spend on the tablet on a daily basis.

Battery life is fairly respectable with Amazon’s 13-hour battery life ringing largely true to life, though charging is much slower than you might be used to with your smartphone with a full charge in a whopping 5 hours via the USB-C port.

Reviewer: Stuart Andrews

Full review: Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Pro