Amazon still sells an 8-inch tablet you can toss in a backpack or a carry-on and not treat like jewelry. Fire HD 8 in its 12th-generation line, priced at $84.99 (was $130), updated again in 2024, keeps the same 7.94 by 5.40 by 0.37-inch polycarbonate body and 11.88-ounce weight that made earlier versions easy to forget until you needed a screen. Black, Emerald, and Hibiscus covers have a light texture that hides smudges. USB-C sits on the edge next to a 3.5mm headphone jack that most newer tablets have already abandoned, plus a microSD slot that accepts cards up to 1TB, while dual speakers fire from the bottom in landscape.
An IPS LCD with a resolution of 1280 by 800 provides eight inches of screen real estate and a reasonable 189 pixels per inch. It’s ideal for indoor viewing of movies, comics, and Kindle pages from a tray table. Still, the moderate resolution helps the battery survive a little longer. Amazon claims up to 13 hours of mixed use, but lab testing indicate it’s more like 10 hours of video or 9.5 hours of streaming; either way, that’s a full travel day and then some. The included charger is a wimpy 5W USB-C brick that takes approximately 5 hours to fully charge. Fortunately, a 15W charger, which you probably already own, reduces that time to roughly 2.5 hours.
- Fire HD 8 offers an 8" HD display for seamless streaming and gaming, coupled with a 5MP rear facing camera for photos—with a thin, light, durable...
- Fast and responsive with long battery life - With up to 4 GB RAM (2X more than 2022 release), 64GB of storage, and up to 1 TB of expandable storage...
- Save time, get creative - Enjoy three smart tools to help you send polished emails, quickly summarize webpages, and create unique wallpapers.
The processor, MediaTek’s MT8169A hexa-core microprocessor with a top speed of 2.0GHz, remains unchanged from last year, but the quantity of RAM has altered. The base 32GB devices now have 3GB of RAM, up from 2GB, while the 64GB variant has 4GB. As long as you’re not attempting to do too much, like as playing a hefty 3D game or running many apps at the same time, the gadget runs fairly smoothly. After the OS has taken its chunk, you’ll have around 25GB of storage on the 32GB device and 54GB on the 64GB model. Which is why the extra $30 for the 64GB model appears to be a very decent deal if you intend to save a lot of movies on it.
The software layer is still Fire OS 8, which is built on Android 11. Amazon promises to provide at least four years of upgrades after launch, which is reassuring. As expected, Prime Video, Kindle, and Audible all function normally, and the hands-free Alexa remains as useful as ever. The appstore is, as usual, Amazon’s, and if you want to access the Google Play store, you must sideload it (instruction above). The cameras may as well be honest: a 5 megapixel rear shooter that can only produce 1080p video and a 2 megapixel front camera that is just good enough for a quick video call. Parental controls and a child profile are offered as usual, however.
