My old 7.8" Samsung tablet just died and I was attracted to to Fire HD tablet because I like the 8" size and the Prime day price was attractive. Well, some bargains are no bargains. I am very disappointed with this tablet. I have been an Android user for many years. In addition to my Android phones, I always owned a 7-8" tablet (Nexus 7 tablet and Samsung 7.8 tablet) for reading and playing around at home. By comparison to these two old devices the Fire HD tablet does not measure up.
1. The screen resolution is not crisp and not bright. I expected it to less bright and clear then Samsung Amoled display but not by such a large margin. By default the screen is set to be half as bright as it can be. You can fix that my swiping down and dragging the brightness to the right. But even on a full brightness setting it is not even close to an old Samsung screen brightness and clarity.
2. The tablet is very slugging, there is a noticeable delay every time I try to do something.
3. Not all apps (purchased (i.e. not free!) from Amazon app store) that I had on my old tablet appeared in the list of available apps.
4. The interface presented on Fire is very restrictive as I am used to having full control over what I see (and don't see) on my desktop. Fire HD does not allow me to remove some apps that I know I will never use. I cannot control where the icons are placed on the screen, how large they, and what sceen page they appear on. The best I can do is drag built-in apps I will never use to a folder I called "Useless" and give up just one spot on my screen.
When I open an app, say a Washing Post article, it puts a large icon (larger than a regular icon) first on my home screen taking up half of the screen, moving the apps I use all the time down (leaving just one row of app icons visible) as shown on attached photo. Yes, I can remove the large icon by clicking and selecting "remove from desktop" but it requires extra clicks.
Unlike an Android device with a standard Google interface I have no control over where icons appear. I like organizing screens by theme: a page for games, a page for photo/video apps, a page for text related apps and so forth. I also like to control where on each icon appears on the screen (top/bottom/left/right) so it is easy for me to instantly locate it. I find the look and feel of Fire HD interface very frustrating as it has a set of behavior that cannot be customized.
5. I purchased half of my apps from Amazon app store and half from Android Playstore. Fire HD tablet does not support Playstore out of the box.
I found instructions on the web of how to install Playstore to make more apps available, but there is no guarantee that all of them will work because Amazon forked the Android OS and potential for incompatible behavior is there for every app. I was successful in installing Android API (which is part of the instructions) which gave me back the three buttons at the bottom of the page (back button, home page, active apps) which were missing from Amazon interface, but I was not able to run the App Store app itself.
6. Some people mentioned that the package included a rubberized skin for the back of the tablet, but my package did not include it. Perhaps it was excluded because it was the Prime day discount special.
7. The initial set up was quite lengthy, it took about 30 minutes of downloads and updates before I could start using the tablet.
Is there anything that I do like? Yes
1. Battery life (at least while it is so new) is excellent. I left it unplugged overnight and it was still 100% in the morning. After using it on and off all day the battery was still more than 50% full.
2. Alexa works well. I have multiple Alexa devices and since you cannot give them individual "wake up" words that could get pretty frustrating. However there is a setting (which is off by default) that allows the device closest to you to respond rather having all of them respond at the same time.
3. When the device started it already knew who I was and the registration process was just one click. If the device was purchased as a gift for someone else there was a chance to say "No, this is not me".
4. For someone totally new to a device the tablet started with a nice tutorial (after all the updates were done).
Given the price (and thus the modest processor it is built on), I expected it to be a bit less responsive, but the sluggishness was more noticeable than I expected. I knew the display will not be as bright as Amoled display on my last tablet but the difference was bigger than I expected. I also did not expect to be as frustrated as I am with the user interface.
You can find it on Amazon by following this link.
Ali Julia review ★★☆☆☆
