hey everybody its la inside but and we’re taking a look today at the new Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet this is an 8 inch tablet that has been around for a while but this is a new iteration that adds some new features but surprisingly doesn’t add anything new inside of it so this is really the same tablet from a performance standpoint that Amazon has been offering since 2016 but there are some new features that this one has that we will be covering in this review among other things now I do want to let you know though in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this tablet is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this runs at about $79 as you see it but there’s a catch for that low price and that is advertising you have to put up with ads on the lockscreen Amazon calls them special offers and when you turn the device off and then back on again you will see an ad and you can easily just swipe it away and move on but if you don’t like the ads you can spend 95 bucks and get the same tablet without the ads on there it is pretty much the same from a hardware standpoint as last year’s tablet with one exception a new camera on the front it is now 2
megapixels versus a lower resolution camera that was on there last year but otherwise it is the same hardware it’s a mediatek mt6752 bytes and it also has 16 gigabytes of internal storage there’s also a version that offers 32 gigabytes of internal storage so the hardware is really the same if you use last year’s tablet the display is the same as well it is a nice display though at least for the price 1280 by 800 it’s IPs you’ve got really nice viewing angles on it really not bad as a reading device or media consumption device decent color on it but you’ll notice the screen is very shiny and there’s no anti fingerprint coating on it like you might see on more expensive devices so it’s going to pick up fingerprints and grease very very easily so keep up walk around for it I don’t like the dress products up here on the channel so this is what its gonna look like when you get it out of the box and start playing with it it will very quickly pick up a lot of that grease from your fingers there so just be ready for that so while the hardware is pretty much the same as last year’s version they did make a pretty significant update to the software inside of this and they’ve added now the ability to issue voice commands to the tablet much like you would with one of their echo devices using the a-word so for example I could say to the tablet here while it’s off Amazon tell me the weather in New York City so you can see here that it’s in always listening mode and it just turned itself on when it heard the trigger word and was able to execute a command it will do any of the echo
commands you’re familiar with so you can integrate it right into the rest of your home there and you also get visual feedback from it too and we’ll be looking at one other neat feature related to in-home use with the voice commands that you might find interesting so that’s probably the biggest change here on their low ends Hamlet the only other tablet up until now that did this was their 10 inch version so for $79 you can get a echo device with a screen which I thought was kind of nice this is running fire OS 6 which is the new version of Amazon’s operating system now this is derived from Android but it doesn’t run stuff from the Google Play Store and I always like to remind people about this because if you buy this tablet even though it’s running Android you can’t just go and install all the apps that you had on your Google Play account there’s ways to get it on here but it’s not all that consumer friendly I’m sure folks down in the comments will tell you how to do it or at least point you in that direction but generally it’s not something that a lot of consumers are going to do so if you have apps purchased on another platform you’ll likely have to buy them again on this one and the tablet weighs twelve point eight ounces or 363 grams so not all that heavy you can even hold it with one hand if your hand is moderately sized so if you’re looking for something with a larger screen that you can hold with a single hand comfortably this might do it for you not much for ports on this one you’ve got stereos speakers here on this side for watching media so if you’re watching stuff you might want to have those speakers pointed downward there on the other side here you’ve got the built-in SD card slot and another little improvement on this one versus last year’s version is that you can put in larger from a capacity standpoint SD cards on here this will take up to a 400 gigabyte card last year’s version topped out
at around 200 gigabytes so if you have a lot of media to put in you can get it in there you got a camera here on the back nothing spectacular on that front same as last year so not great image quality but it is a cheap tablet after all your power button is right here this connector is used for charging but it also works as an on-the-go USB port so you could conceivably plug in a game controller or something into that port it also has bluetooth support too so you could use wireless devices with it one thing I’ve heard from people over the years is that sometimes this connector causes some trouble over time I don’t think this will be any better or worse than prior versions there so just be careful when you’re plugging in that charging cable headphone jack is right here you got a built-in microphone over there this will support headsets too with microphones built-in and you’ve got a volume rocker over there battery life on this they say is up to 10 hours I think that’s probably realistic if you’re doing web browsing and some other minor kinds of stuff if you’re doing something more aggressive like game playing and that sort of thing that will certainly tax the processor more and obviously reduce battery life but I think for media watching and web browsing 8 to 10 hours is not unreasonable from a battery life standpoint so let’s take a look now and see how it performs and we’ll begin with some basic web browsing here it’s not too bad when you’re on a site it doesn’t have a lot of JavaScript running so for example nasa.gov which doesn’t
have all the advertising for example that a new site might have does seem to load up pretty quickly here even videos are popping up here without too many problems I can hit play on that and see how that streams up here so you can see by and large it’s not bad from a general browsing standpoint now there are a few sites that are beginning to tax this aging processor a bit namely new sites that load in a of advertising it might have a lot of JavaScript running in the background you’ll notice some of those web pages really don’t load up all that quickly and maybe act a little sluggish on this particular tablet this is partly due to the fact that the processor is getting a bit long in the tooth and if you have that voice activation enabled that no doubt might take up some resources as well so just keep that in mind it’s not going to be a speed demon if you are a YouTube fan this is probably not the tablet for you because Google and Amazon have been fighting with each other for years over YouTube on Amazon devices and what they’ve put together is this fake app which is what I call it because it says youtube.com/ on it but it actually goes to the YouTube website and not to an official app so what you’re looking at here is essentially the mobile web version of YouTube and you don’t get very high quality video out of this so you’ll notice that the videos will load up ok but the quality isn’t quite there it’s not even running at 720p here at least from what my eyes see so it’s really not an ideal YouTube experience and a lot of the features you
might get from an official YouTube app you will not get on here and there’s no way at the moment to easily install an official YouTube app on these Android tablets so keep that in mind there is no a version of Netflix and many other popular streaming apps on Amazon devices but youtube is the holdout due to this feud they’re having with Google which probably will never end so just bear that in mind one thing that does run very nicely of course are Amazon’s own video services so we’ve got for example here an Amazon video that just loads right up very very quickly here because it’s so tightly integrated with the device and its operating system after all Amazon tablets are designed for you to be purchasing Amazon content and they make that a very smooth process here and it’s noticeably faster than any of the other services that are available on this platform now this device is not a gaming powerhouse by any means but it can run a bulk of the games you’ll find in the Amazon App Store a lot of these are the same versions that you’ll find on the other Android platforms this is the Android version of Minecraft so if you got a kid that’s really into Minecraft and you don’t want to spend a lot of money for him or her to play it on the road you can certainly get by with this it’ll be a little sluggish but not bad and another type of game that runs very well on here are retro games you can get emulators to play some
of those old games or you can download remakes like this one this is the remake of Sonic CD and it works with my Bluetooth game controller just fine here and it’s a pretty decent experience for a $79 tablet so not bad there one thing to note though is that Amazon used to have a lot more free stuff than they do now on their App Store for Prime members they had something called underground and there was a bunch of stuff that was usually something you’d have to pay for on the Google Play Store for example that was free on Amazon but they are phasing that program out so a lot of that free stuff is no longer there which I think diminishes the value a little bit of these tablets and on the 3dmark gaming benchmark test called slingshot we got a score of 239 which puts it exactly where the 2016 version of this tablet scored on that same test because it has the same hardware built-in so there you go not much has changed on the hardware front but there are some software improvements and speaking of there’s one last thing to take a look at here and that is show mode Amazon turn on show mode and you can see here now the regular fire OS interface has disappeared and now we have this persistent echo show interface and what they’re saying is that this will actually work exactly like the echo show does so we could for example say Amazon show me my video flash briefing and now what it’s going to do is pull up video content and display it on-screen here just like I would see if I had a echo show device what I’m noticing
though is that initially when the video starts up or when you pull the interface up it gets very dim like this so there are some kinks that they have to work out on it but largely it is working like an echo show would and all the things you can do with the show you can do here in fact you can even have it look at your security cameras they sell a dock for about 40 dollars that will actually let this device work as a show when it’s docked and then will automatically revert back to being a tab when you take it out of the dock so you have that option or you can just ask it to switch in and out of this mode so I can say to it now Amazon turn off show mode and then it will revert back to that tablet interface likewise you can also do it from up on your pull down control panel there so it’s pretty cool you’ve got the ability now to kind of use this thing as both a tablet but also an appliance that works like other perhaps more expensive Amazon devices with a screen so by and large I think it’s an OK tablet it’s not the fastest thing in the world that feels a little more sluggish to me than the prior editions did just because it’s got the same processor built in the same amount of memory but it’s doing more but for $79 I think it’s a pretty good value especially if you don’t want to spend as much on an iPad and I can tell you in my
personal experience that these things believe it or not even though they’re not built as well as an iPad are actually more durable I have two children I’ve got a five-year-old in a two year old the five year olds iPad is smashed to bits the two-year-old has the smaller version of the Amazon fire tablet here inside of the kids case and that thing is still in pristine condition it’s caked with yogurt and who knows what but it’s still actually working just as good as it was when we got it and the screen hasn’t cracked yet yet the iPad inside an Otterbox case is smashed to bits and I think it’s a lot less risky to buy one of these for a kid or for a teenager or whatever then a more expensive iPad especially given what these kids put these devices through I do recommend though from a performance standpoint that if you need something that is more in line with a higher-end tablet go for the 10-inch device because it does have a faster processor that performs better than what you might see out of this 8-inch tablet or the smaller 7-inch one but nonetheless if you’re looking for a usable tablet that can get at most of your media except YouTube I think this is definitely something worth considering at it’s very reasonable $79 price tag until next time this is lon Simon thanks for watching this channel was brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters Chris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht Gerard Newberg in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to land TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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