Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9” review

HARDWARE

The chipset inside the new Kindle Fire isn’t the latest tech. The dual-core TI OMAP4470 runs at a respectable 1.5GHz, and though it was a respectable chip last year, it’s starting to look a little long in the tooth. It’s roughly equivalent to the Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset in the Google Nexus 7. The operating system feels smooth to browse, as much thanks to updates from Amazon as the more powerful hardware on offer here.

The browser is fairly quick, with complex pages loading rapidly

We tested the browser with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and it scored 1,453ms, a touch faster than when we tested the same hardware on an essentially vanilla Android 4.0 OS in the middle of last year. It’s still a respectable score today, and shows that Amazon’s Silk browser is as fast as most out there.

The Kindle Fire won’t let us easily run any of our standard 3D benchmarks – most notably the new 3DMark for Android. Based on previous experience though, it’s again roughly equivalent to a Google Nexus 7 in 3D, however the more limited selection of games in Amazon’s app store should put off keen gamers anyway. Casual players will be more than happy with what’s on offer though.

Amazon don’t officially state it, but the battery inside the Kindle Fire HD 8.9” has been shown to be a 6,000mAh model. That’s almost half the capacity of the iPad 4 and two-thirds that of the Google Nexus 10. Now the 8.9in display makes the latest Kindle Fire a smaller device than those 9.7in tablets, but the difference isn’t that great. Again our usual battery benchmark wouldn’t work, so we streamed a movie from LoveFilm and used that to calculate a continuous playback score of eight hours and 20 mins. This is a decent score and practically identical to that of the smaller, original Kindle Fire HD.

PRICE

Given its screen quality, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9” is a bit of a bargain, starting at just £229 with free delivery. For this you get 16GB of storage, for £30 more you can upgrade this to 32GB, although it’s really not necessary for most users as the Kindle Fire’s do a great job of storing all your content in the cloud and make it easy to browse what’s there and pull down what you actually need on your device.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9” comes by default with adverts on its lockscreen. If you pay £10 extra you can get rid of these adverts. Or you might feel better if you think about it as costing £239, but you can save £10 by having some adverts.

An example of advertising on the lock screen, here seen on the smaller Kindle Fire HD

That the choice exists makes a good example for the kind of device you’re buying. The Kindle Fire HD is more alike to an iPad than an Android tablet, despite being based on Android. Like the iPad, a lot of time and effort has been put into selling you content through the device, and because of this certain functions have been limited. Google also wants to sell you stuff, but it hasn’t yet let this overly affect how you use its devices.

If you like Amazon, and you’re happy to buy your music, illustrated books, graphic novels and periodicals from it – plus you’re a LoveFilm or Netflix subscriber for video content – then the Kindle Fire HD 8.9” is a great tablet at a great price.

If you prefer to take your content from a wider range of sources though, like to play all the latest games, have access to a wider range of apps and have the freedom to choose your own browser and email client, then the Google Nexus 10 is a better buy for £90 more. That said, if you’re on a tight budget and are happy to work around the limitations, then the Kindle Fire 8.9″ is still a lot of tablet for the money.