Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7″ review

AMAZON KINDLE FIRE HDX 7 BATTERY LIFE

A 4,550mAh battery means there’s plenty of juice to use the tablet away from a power socket. In our video playback test, which we run at half screen brightness, we managed an impressive 11h 52m. That’s an entire long-haul flight’s worth of entertainment there.

AMAZON KIND FIRE HDX 7 CAMERA

There’s no rear camera on this model, only a front-facing camera, which you can use for video chats. It shoots 720p video and, while the quality won’t blow you away, is more than good enough for the job at hand. We’re not particularly bothered by the lack of a rear camera, as we rarely use a tablet for photography.

AMAZON KIND FIRE HDX 7 VERSIONS AND CONCLUSION

There’s no microSD card slot on this model, so you need to buy the version with the right amount of storage for you. The 16GB version costs £199, the 32GB version (recommended) costs £229 and the 64GB is a reasonable £259. If you want 4G as well as Wi-Fi, it’s an additional £70.

The default configuration comes ‘With Special Offers’, which means you’ll get ads for things on the lock screen. You can pay £10 when you buy to disable this feature, although you can pay to have this feature turned off at a later date, either by calling customer services or using the Mayday button. Our advice would be to see how you get on with the standard model, paying to turn it off if you find it too annoying.

There’s a lot to like about the Kindle Fire HDX 7″. It’s extremely well priced, too. Admittedly you lose out a few minor things (NFC and a rear camera, for example), but what’s there is extremely high quality. There’s even quite a lot to like about Fire OS, particularly if you buy everything through and use all of Amazon’s servers. For some, the Mayday button is a reason to buy alone.

That said, even though Amazon’s App Store has pretty much the same range of apps as the Google Play Store, there are some notable things missing. For most people, then, the Google Nexus 7 (2013) with its more open approach is the better buy.