Amazon - Fire HD 8 - 8" - Tablet - 16GB 8th Generation, 2018 Release - Black

First, the positive side. I purchased a Samsung tab A 8" before this one more than twice the price, I was nearly shocked it was not HD and has only ONE speaker with small sound, not even mention stereo. That's most important yet basic for a tablet to read, watch, and listen. Only camera is better and you get Google play store. But who really use tablet camera at home? Smart phones have much better camera now. Amazon app store is OK for me to live with. Of course I returned Samsung tab and bought this one for less than half the price with HD display and two speakers of stereo sound. I almost feel people are fooled to buy into Samsung's name. And even gave high ratings! I assume they never used HD display and two speaker stereo sound. Given above said of products and price, still there are a lot of disappointments. Especially because I have a Fire HD 7" used more than 5-6 years. Now let's go to negative side. In general, the new HD 8" tab has no any improvements from my many year old HD 7". With some features only stayed same while a lot even getting worse except screen is bigger. More details here compare my HD 7": What remain same, CPU, RAM, Storage. Display about same but brightness is lower have to adjust to high end for a new tablet. Touch screen is dull less responsive, you have to TAP rather than TOUCH, bit annoying. Although still has two speakers stereo, but sound is too small low volume have to adjust to high end. Very small round holes at speaker opening instead of longer opening on my HD 7" which sound is much louder and full only used half volume for watching movies has more room if I want to listen music. I was actually quite amazed so small speakers can play such loud and beautiful music. The cameras are poorer even though I don't need to use. Still 2mp front and rear are too low now a days. 2mp front and 5 rear are minimal I think as was HD 7". Typing gets more difficult because keyboard not respond to touch but TAP little harder. One big very useful feature is missing, my HD 7" has voice input for typing ten times faster but I can't find it on new HD 8". I remember Fire tab said can cast Youtube only to smart TV but I am unable to link up to my TV. Not sure if they dropped it. One thing still same but I hope can change. It's more convenient and handy to recharge the tablet from bottom when you hold tablet upright instead from top port. Maybe more not in my mind right now. Many people might never use Fire HD 7" before to fully understand my comments above. For this price and products, I really can't complain. On the other hand, it is a pity and regret that new HD 8" is not even keep up same quality level as HD 7" many years ago. Let alone upgrade. I wish Amazon will see/ read my review. I was more satisfied and amazed of my many year old HD 7".

This is gonna be a weird review, but bear with me. I bought an Amazon tablet once before and HATED it. While it can be made to run Google Play Store/apps, only someone with IT experience will get that working. But... I had some Best Buy gift cards, nothing that I needed, and they had a tablet with decent specs for $50. So, I thought I'd give it a 2nd chance as a secondary tablet... ...Which, for that purpose, the Amazon Fire HD 8 is a great device! Pros: It has GPS, which Best Buy says that is doesn't. So, download an app like Maps.me and you have a GPS even if you don't have internet! You just have to download the maps in the app before you go on your trip... The screen is clear and crisp. It's fairly zippy. Don't expect a powerhouse, but it does run some big apps much more quickly than my other tablet. Surprisingly. The tablet's storage is adequate for throwing a few large apps on and still having plenty of room to play with. And, with a Micro SD card, it exceeds most tablets that I've used. ie The Fire 8 actually moves large apps to the SD card. My Samsung Galaxy Tab A says that it does, but 99% of the files stay on the device; I've looked in the file directory. TL;DR You really can put any number of apps that will fit on your Micro SD, not just movies, photos, etc... Can't leave this list without mentioning the PRICE!!! As aforementioned, I got it on sale for $50. At this price range, I have never seen a better tablet. Ever... If they dropped it another $10, I might have gotten 2... I got this because I work with kids and it is looking like it will be AWESOME for that purpose. Cons: The WiFi is a lil bit slower (I measured) than more expensive tablets, but not unreasonably so. I had zero issues streaming HD movies. The app store leaves much to be desired, but it's sufficient for my needs. Again, it is possible to make it run Google Play Store/apps, but don't even bother attempting it unless you're good with computers. Really... You will ruin your device. The home screen is annoying because it has no way, that I've found so far, to make it look as cleaned up as I do with an Android device. But, it does let you put all icons into a single folder so that kinda fixes the problem. Overall: I LOVE THIS TABLET. No, it will not be a replacement for a powerhouse tablet for gaming or graphic design, but it will treat the ultra-low-budget gamer well. If you just need a tablet to surf the internet and watch Netflix, I see NO REASON to get another tablet; you can use the hundreds of dollars saved to buy the Micro SD and still have a tonne of money leftover. The possible 400gb of actual expandable storage, when combined with this price point, puts it heads and shoulders above ANY COMPETITION.

My wife has an older Kindle that is about 10 years old and the keys just don't work like they used to. She decided to replace it with a Fire 8" tabiet (16GB) after seeing that the prices on new Kindles of similar quality were out the roof. Long story short: She likes the new tablet as a Kindle reader (with two big caveats). The down sides (why I took off two stars): After charging the unit overnight, the battery life is not good and the display auto-dims to levels that make it essentially unusable for her. We turned off the auto-brightness and manually set it to an acceptable level (which is not overly bright). None-the-less, she needs to charge it over night, every night, or she wakes up and finds it down to below 10%. Huh? She doesn't surf the web or have Wi-Fi on most of the time so why is the battery only lasting 3-4 hours? I hear that this is a common battery life for these units. Amazon needs to replace the existing power platform and programming with a higher capacity battery and better power management if they expect people to be satisfied. I can't comment on the general usefulness of the Tablet outside of using it as a Kindle reader. If battery life is any indication, it would likely only function for a couple of hours before needing to be recharged. Unfortunately, she was used to using her dedicated Kindle reader for days at a time--something this tablet doesn't come close to providing as a reader. The moral of the story: Buy a dedicated Kindle reader instead if that is what you intend to use the Fire 8" tablet for.

This latest release of the Amazon tablet is a perfect tablet for kids, or really anyone who needs a basic tablet for light entertainment. We bought two for our kids for the holidays this year along with protective cases. They love them for the games, books, videos, etc., and to have a tablet they can call their own. As parents we love them for two reasons--1) the price just can't be beat. It's a solid tablet, and does enough to keep our kids entertained when we need them to be. The thing that sets this tablet apart from any other tablet on the market for kids is Amazon's parental controls. They are the best that I've seen (and we've tried several other kids tablets) and Amazon is constantly updating them and making improvements. You can log in at any time from a computer or phone, and control each child's individual account from your Amazon account. You control the apps available, the books available, the videos available, the amount of time they can use the tablet on any given day, etc. You can even shut it down from wherever you are!!! Amazon has clearly put a lot of thought into the parental controls available. The biggest drawback to the tablet is that this is the second one we've had to buy for one of our kids due to the terrible charging port. We've told our kids we have to be the ones that plug it in, but it will still break (I've had these awful ports on my samsung phones before the fantastic redesign on the S9)--they just aren't durable and the metal tab will break. If you can get a few years out of it before that happens then you'll be getting your money's worth. The good thing is Amazon saves the account information so if you get a replacement or an upgrade you can set it up just like the original. Overall I highly recommend this, EXPECIALLY for parents that want to have some control over their children's online life.

I have purchased 4 of these in a years time. One for my daughter, one for my 93 year old Aunt and 2 for myself. These tablets are great for anything. I just discovered that they will verbally read all my Kindle books if I turn on text to speech. My IPad will supposedly do that but it is much more complicated and not easy to do. I chose to not use my memory card for internal memory but decided to load about 10,000 scanned and digitized pics on it from my laptop and then I use a program call F-Stop slide show for Kindle and I can use the Fire for easily viewing all my digital data taken from my removable memory card, I love it. There is also a procedure found on the internet that shows you how to load the Google play store by downloading four programs in the correct sequence, I have done this on 3 of my Amazon fires. Then you can download the Google Keyboard with the microphone built in so you can dictate emails, etc. I read all my books with it or just listen to them with the text to speech feature. I have talked to a friend about this and now he wants one even though he has a 9.7 IPad. I also have an IPad but really enjoy these Amazon Fires for my digital pics and reading Kindle Books. They also work great as an Alexa, I have many devices that work with it. When the price goes back to $50 my friend will also buy one. Also, the adds only show up on the lock screen, so don’t pay more to get rid of them.

Bought on a Black Friday deal, this tablet from Amazon is exactly what you might expect from a cheap piece of such hardware: it has its flaws, but you can't get much better for that price. First of all, you need to know that this tablet has Amazon's version of Android, which does not come with Google Play Store and a few other services from that vendor. While you can find most apps on Amazon App Store, it is sometimes quite inconvenient to manually install apps from .apk files (you never know what's inside them) and a "hack-install" of Google Services and Play Store can sometimes cause a headache. The screen quality is decent. It isn't FHD and the image is not nearly as crisp as in an iPad Pro or Galaxy Tab S3, but again - you pay only a percentage of the price of those two. It's acceptable... unless you intend to work in direct sunlight a lot. In that case - consider a more expensive alternative. The Amazon Tab 8 has only 1.5GB of RAM and a relatively weak processor, which makes it a rather slow tablet... and it feels. Don't expect it to be an F1 car... rather an old diesel-powered family mobile... which can get annoying. Overall... it has a lot of flaws, most of which its slow operation is the worst in my opinion, but there's not much to choose from in the price range it was on Black Friday...

I purchased this tablet for a three-week trip overseas as a low-cost alternative to carrying a laptop. The tablet performed fine for what I needed it to do, mainly accessing my Gmail account and watching downloaded Netflix videos (this app and function work great). The video/photo apps are a little weird; when I pull up photo and video from a micro SD card, the thumbnail images do not display in exact chronological order. There is no obvious setting or other fix to this bug. The biggest drawback of this device is limited apps; only apps from Amazon's website can be downloaded. Google Home and other apps cannot be installed without the use of a "jailbreak" website link. Chromecast technology will not work. Google Play will not install, which prevented me from taking advantage of the free anti-Virus program that Best Buy advertised when I made this purchase. Ridiculous! The value for the money is OK. But buyers should be aware that they will not have access to the full range of apps that can be accessed through a normal Android-based tablet. If I could make this purchase again, I'd probably shell out a bit more for a Samsung model or similar device.

So, this is my 3rd Kindle. My first one broke just over a year old due to overheating. The whole screen would turn black and freeze. My second Kindle I liked the best. I had it about 2 1/2 years when the wifi connection just stopped working. I took it to the geek squad and they couldn't fix it. It was still under warranty so they told me to return it and get a new one. So I had to print out all my pictures saved on the Kindle before I could return it. This leads me to getting my 3rd Kindle. Best Buy said that this is the newest model and ended up being cheaper than what I paid for my 2nd one. I haven't really used it except to take pictures and the images look fine on the Kindle itself but once emailed to myself and downloaded to my computer, they are so blurry and nearly unreadable. I never had this issue with my 2nd Kindle. The only reason I wouldn't recommend the product is because the camera images are blurry. If you just want to ready a book and get on the internet then the Kindle is fine.