The Fire 7 costs from £50 ( buy here) and the Fire HD 8 £80 ( buy here). The 2017 Amazon Fire HD 10 costs £150 for 32GB ( buy here) of storage or £180 with 64GB ( buy here), both with adverts on the lock screen which cost £10 to remove.įor comparison, that’s £20 cheaper than the previous Fire HD 10 and with double the base storage. There are some power-saving modes, including one that suspends the wifi connection when the tablet reckons you’re not using it for a while.Like the HD 8, the cameras are poor, producing blurry shots with little in the way of detail – only to be used in an emergency.Amazon’s “on deck” feature downloads content that it thinks you might like in the background while on wifi and charging, removing it automatically when you need the space.The Fire HD 10 isn’t passcoded or encrypted out of the box, but I recommend using both.The buttons are along one edge of the device, together with the microUSB charging port and headphones socket. In most cases that’s perfectly fine, particularly for media-consumption apps, but there are some glaring omissions with LastPass being one – if you use the password manager you’re stuck, although you can side-load it from other stores if you trust them. You can turn it off, and if you’ve set a screen lock it asks you to unlock the tablet to respond for certain queries.Īs with previous versions of Fire OS, there’s no access to the Google Play Store, with Amazon’s App Store your only option. Alexa can also control playback, skipping forward or backwards, and volume, as well as find content via voice search. It works pretty well from across the room when it’s quiet. The tablet then acts a bit like an Echo Show, answering via voice and showing content on the screen, such as the current and upcoming weather. Not only can Alexa respond to queries when holding the home button, but there’s a hands-free mode that operates very much like an Echo device, listening out for the “Alexa” wake word to then take commands. The biggest improvement is full Alexa integration. There’s an improved For You section (previously called Recents), which highlights the content and apps you’ve been using recently and learns what you might like, so it can suggest things to try. The home screen interface filled with sliding screens dedicated to different types of content works well for a media-consumption device. The Fire HD 10 comes with Amazon’s latest version of Fire OS 5.5 based on Android 5 Lollipop. Fire OS 5.5Īctivate Alexa hands-free mode to be able to simply say ‘Alexa’ to trigger the voice assistant. I could just about watch three full-length downloaded movies before the battery gave out with the brightness near maximum.Ĭharging the Fire HD 10 takes quite a while, with 80% added to the battery in three hours and a full charge taking about four hours. Amazon reckons it will last about 10 hours of mixed use, which was about right in my testing. It’s not going to win any performance awards – a top-end smartphone will be faster – but it was more than acceptable, feeling slightly snappier than the Fire HD 8.īattery life was also pretty good. Everyday performance is much smoother, with navigating and loading apps fairly snappy and browsing with multiple tabs in the Silk browser mostly smooth, while game performance was solid even in graphically intensive games such as Real Racing. The new Fire HD 10 has a new 1.8GHz quad-core processor and double the RAM of its predecessor at 2GB.
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