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Amazon Fire HD 8 (2020) review

While many Android tablet manufacturers have given up on the market, Amazon has found some success with their very affordable, very customized, and very easy to use Fire HD tablets. The 2020 version of the Amazon Fire HD 8 should be no exception. If you love Amazon’s ecosystem of video, music, books, audiobooks, apps, Alexa compatible accessories and everything retail, the Amazon Fire HD 8 is going to be a great portal to that world.

Specs

The MediaTek MT8168 2.0 GHz quad-core processor and 2GB RAM is 30% faster than previous versions of the Fire HD 8. You’ve also got an 8” 1280 x 800-pixel screen, its form factor is 8.0 by 5.4 by 0.4 inches, and it weighs 0.78 lbs.

Onboarding Experience

I want to start with the out-of-box onboarding experience. This is what users see first, and with the Amazon Fire HD 8, it is very very good. Amazon has gone to great lengths to make the setup experience very informative and easy to use. It starts with a video about Alexa and goes through a bunch of the features of the device. Then it proceeds to explain basic navigation which is very useful for people who are not super familiar with computers or tablets. Here’s a video of it:

The out of box experience is going to be top-notch for new users.

The onboarding tutorial even teaches you how to scroll content pages.

Here’s a screen explaining the shapes in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. This is one of the things Android does very poorly… and now that Google is switching to a wiener-shaped gesture bar, the new-user usability is even worse. Something Amazon could do to increase the usability here would be to add text labels to the navigation buttons. There’s PLENTY of room to add the works “Back”, “Home”, and “Active Apps” to the navigation bar to clarify the navigation buttons for beginners (and reduce cognitive load required to memorize the functions.)

When you finally get to the Amazon Fire home screen, you’ll see that it is very well designed for easy navigation. There are words written in the language you chose on first boot that clearly identify the functions of most of the elements on the screen. Every app icon has a label, and the sections at the top are clearly identified. This concept of making the user interface obvious to the user has huge advantages. There are less cryptic icons to memorize. There are no hidden gestures to discover and memorize (other than the top-edge gesture.)

This attention to “ease to learn” usability is probably what makes the Amazon Fire tablets so much more popular than other Android tablets.

Hardware

The 8″ screen is not a spectacularly awesome screen. This is, after all, a very affordable $89 tablet. Still, it’s absolutely usable with a1280 x 800-pixel resolution.

You’ll notice quite a good-sized bezel here as well. Thin or non-existent bezels are very popular now, but the problem there is… how do you hold the device without touching the touch screen and accidentally activating buttons. I have this happen many times with bezel-less touch-screen phones. It doesn’t make sense unless you can someday make a touch screen recognize your intent and decipher between holding or interacting touch actions. Of course, that’s not possible right now, so a good thick bezel makes for a good place to hold the tablet.

One one of the longer edges, there is a small 2MP front-facing camera in the bezel. It’s on the long edge so that you can place the device in a stand-in horizontal landscape mode and use it as a video conferencing screen. This comes in handy in “Show mode”.

The top, or right edge depending on how you’re holding it, has the power button and volume up/down buttons. There’s also a USB-C charging port.

On the opposite end next to the USB-C port there’s a 3.5mm headset jack for plugging in headphones.

The longer top/left edge has two speakers with a series of holes to let the sound out. The sound is nice and loud, which is important since “show mode” makes the tablet act as an Alexa device.

The opposite longer edge has a little plastic flap that you can open with a fingernail in order to reveal a MicroSD slot that you can use to add up to 1Tb of more storage space.

The final edge is just smooth clean plastic.

There’s a 2 megapixel camera on the back, too, but this is a tablet so don’t expect to use this for anything other than maybe showing something on a video call. The image quality is not impressive.

Software

The software is really where the Amazon Fire HD 8 differentiates itself from other inexpensive Android tablets. It runs the Amazon Fire OS, which is really Android 9 with a highly customized launcher, lots of integrations with Amazon’s other services, and no Google Play services. So instead of having to log in with your Google account like most Android devices, you have to log in with your Amazon account.

Even the lock screen is customized with Amazon content. Above is an advertisement for some best selling books that you can buy and read in the Amazon Kindle app.

The Fire HD’s “Home” interface consists of side-scrolling panels that let you flip to different sections. It’s similar to the excellent Windows Phone and Windows 8 “Metro” UI design styles as everything is written in plain English (or your language of choice) in order to make it all very easy to understand.

Each panel lets you browse a different type of content offered by Amazon. There’s books, music, audio books, movies & videos, news, games, apps, and even a “shop” section where you can browse for and order real-world things on Amazon.

Amazon’s “Silk” web browser is based on the open-source Chromium 81, so it works just as well as Chrome on Android in terms of HTML rendering.

Besides the Amazon product apps, the Fire HD 8 also includes a lot of must-have apps and utilities that work quite well. These are all built by Amazon. The email app supports POP3, IMAP, and Exchange Servers. At first, it didn’t seem to work at all with Exchange, but after a hard reset and re-add, it’s totally working fine. The Contacts and Calendar apps also sync with Exchange as well as Google accounts. There doesn’t seem to be a way to manually specify CardDAV or CalDAV sync servers though.

The Maps app is basic but functional as well. It uses Nokia’s HERE maps data, not Google’s. Unfortunately it does not offer offline map downloads like the normal HERE apps.


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