No one product can be all things to all people, that’s the point of variety. It’s why Apple now has multiple sized iPhones and iPads, and why Amazon Continues to try filling in the gaps on its Kindle Fire tablet lineup with an eclectic lineup of the most amazing shapes and sizes.
The new Kindle Fire HD 10 is of a piece with that strategy. It’s not a high-end tablet like the Fire HDX 8.9 and not a truly a low-end model like the $ 99 Kindle Fire HD 6. Instead, the new device sits somewhere in the middle, offering the larger screen Consumers want with a $ 229.99 price more can manage. It’s $ 244.99 without lock screens sponsored.
The trouble is I do not really like it.
There is nothing ostensibly wrong with the tablet. It’s sleek, thin (0.30-inches), lighter than an iPad Air (by more than one ounce), shiny (slippery), has a nice widescreen and is quite adept at content consumption and entertainment. However aside from the side-smiling Amazon logo on the back, the Android 5.0 Lollipop-based device that looks completely unrelated Amazon’s forward-leaning and somewhat smaller HDX tablet devices.
It is a part of a new line of low-cost, That widescreen devices come in Day-Glo colors like orange, blue and pink. This largest model, though, only comes in black or white.
Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10′s back is shiny black plastic. It does not feel cheap, but is pretty slippery.
Image: Mashable, Jhila Farzanzeh
These new tablets eschew the design language Amazon Introduced with the HDX – no dynamic edges, no physical buttons on the back (they’re on the edge like most other tablets). And while the HDX offers a 4: 3 aspect ratio, the new tablets, Including this 10.1-inch one, opt for a 16: 9 screen. The result is something That is so wide and relatively narrow it’s almost unwieldy. Stand it on its narrow edge and it looks like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Whatever works
When Amazon first introduce the HDX line, I applauded the edgy design. It stood out and offered some utility, like Ensuring That the downward-firing speakers had enough room to bounce sound off the table and back to you. Amazon did not update the HDX this year and now seems fixated on capturing a lower-end market with the revamped Fire HD line.
The radical differences between the HDX line and the growing HD These indicates a lack of commitment they design ideal. Look at Apple, tablets Their all look alike. That’s good for Consumers and, probably, good for Apple since they’re dealing with design differences less than with size considerations.
The lack of commitment goes deeper than design.
Hope you did not like the carousel too much. Amazon dropped the interface metaphor in its Fire OS 5.
Image: Mashable, Jhila Farzaneh
Since the first Amazon Fire HD, Amazon’s then forked Android interface has featured a unique and useful carousel for managing recently accessed apps and content. It was not perfect, but stood as a signature item.
In recent years, Amazon has shifted to a more Android-like interface , while Maintaining the carousel. Fire OS 5.0, though, Which is built on top of Lollipop is the closest Amazon has come to a stock Android implementation directory. It’s also discarded the carousel, the back arrow and even the virtual home button That used to look like a little house (while you were in an app, you could slide your finger in from the screen edge to make it Appear). In its place is the standard Android 5.0 home circle, back caret and app switcher square.
All subtlety is gone from the interface. Instead of a letter of content and activity categories at the top, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10 Fire running OS 5 features a big, all-cap labels that you ‘swipe through. This actually works rather well. There is also, on the home screen, a grid of installed apps That will be familiar is the Kindle HD and Android aficionados.
Amazon knows a lot about what you like and is always ready to show you more stuff you can buy.
What the new interface excels at is revealing just how much Amazon knows about your buying and content consumption habits. Much more of each screen is devoted is showing you content you might like based on previous choices. Even while you’re in the content, the Kindle Fire HD 10 will suggest new content. This happened to me as I was finishing the second volume of Batman: Knightfall . The system astutely suggested I buy the third and final volume. I just wish it did not do it three or four times.
Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10 features Fire OS 5 and the latest edition of Amazon’s e-mail client.
Amazon has also updated its proprietary Silk browser. It’s cleaner and, in my tests, faster than ever. The e-mail client looks sharp, but I do not understand why they put the email compose icon in dry and random position. You’ll find it at the bottom right of the email subject column.
The guts
As a mid-tier tablet, the Kindle Fire HD 10 is an unpleasant mixture of average and sub-par performances. Amazon says they packed it with a quad-core CPU running at 1.5GHz (dual-core) and 1.2 GHz (dual-core), but the performances often stuttered, Especially every time I hit the home button and waited for the tablet to return me to the home screen. Performance was better within apps. Geekbench gave it a 774 single core performance number and 1502 multicore (compare That is the Kindle HDX’s 1024 single core and 2974 multicore numbers).
The 1,280 x 800 HD display looks good, but is nothing special. It definitely took some getting used to the 16: 9 display size. It was fine for widescreen movies and even some games like the side-scrolling Badlands , but truly odd when you read a Kindle book on it in portrait mode (landscape with multiple pages on one screen made more sense) . Text, by the way, looked sharp, but graphic novels were kind of fuzzy.
The cameras run from average is terrible. The 5-megapixel rear one takes decent photos (and 1080p videos), but virtually any smartphone on the market can do better. The front-facing camera Manages to take some pretty awful shots, though its 720p video is fine for Skype video.
Content is king
Where the Kindle Fire HD 10 does shine is, to be honest, where Amazon shines in content and access is growing its letter of services. The experience is Especially good if you are a paying Amazon Prime Member.
Amazon’s Word Runner is a nice speed-reading tool.
Amazon Continues to experiment with ways to make reading better, if not more fun. The latest reading is the twist aptly called Word Runner. It’s a built-in speed-reading interface for the Kindle Reader app That shows you one word at a time. It starts slowly and speeds up Gradually (still slowing down a bit of a tougher words): unless you hold the screen is, in essence, hit the brakes. I’ve been experiencing single-word reading speed tools since I was in grade school so I kind of enjoyed this. Not sure why Amazon hid it under an inconspicuous menus that you ‘can only access by tapping the screen. That same menus has X-Ray for the Kindle reader and Word Wise Which definition shows hints about the challenging words.
You also have access is Amazon’s movie rental and purchase library. Prime members get Amazon Prime Video, Which includes free streaming of movies and TV shows as well as original shows like recent Emmy winner Transparent . Amazon even lets you download movies and watch them in a 48-hour offline window. I tried this out with Hercules . It took around 20 minutes to download over Wi-Fi, but then I was able to watch it on the train without being connected to the Internet. When the 48-hour window expired, I had to connect to the Internet to continue watching my local copy. I hope Netflix considers adding this option.
Amazon Prime Video offers you a 48 hour viewing window for offline content.
One of my favorite features is still X-ray, Which, when you pause a TV show or movie, will give an overlay window with details about the actors in the scene you’re watching. It’s the ultimate trivia tool.
Movies and TV shows look quite good on the widescreen and the stereo speakers pump out a surprising amount of sound .
Games play well enough, though I’m often frustrated by the action game choices in the Amazon store. Asphalt 8: Airborne, for instance is gone, but I can find the terrible knockoff High Speed Racing: Racing Need .
At a more than $ 100 savings over other size-comparable tablets, the 16GB (128GB is upgradeable through a microSD slot) $ 229.99 Kindle Fire HD 10 is a decent deal. Amazon is also the only one offering free, on-device, live support in the form of Mayday Screen Sharing.
Still, I can not recommend it, not when there are so many other better-designed and more powerful tablets on the market, Including Amazon’s own HDX line. Will you pay more? Definitely. Tablets, though, are something in tend to buy and keep. Skimp now and you will regret it for years to come.
Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10
The Good
Thin • Light • Big Screen • Excellent content consumption platform • Great price
The Bad
Too Wide • Design is average • Well carousel • Average performance
The Bottom Line
The Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10 stands out for its price, size and content offerings, but average performance and loss of distinctive features makes it less desirable than it should be.
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