It is based on Android 9 although lacks Google’s services and apps. The 2020 Fire HD 8 ships with Fire OS 7.3, which was first released with the 2019 Fire HD 10. Swiping across the home screen switches between various types of content, getting you straight into what you want to watch, read, play or listen to. The company has pledged that it will be carbon neutral by 2040. Instead it is a member of the WEEE distributor take-back scheme in the UK. It also does not recycle electronic waste directly. Amazon does not have a fixed price for the repair of the screen or replacement of the battery out of warranty, and instead suggests customers can fix things themselves using the guides provided by iFixit.Īmazon did not comment on the use of recycled material in the Fire HD 8. Typically tablet batteries last at least 500 full charge cycles while maintaining at least 80% capacity. SustainabilityĪmazon does not provide an estimate for the expected lifespan of the battery in the Fire HD 8. I used an 18W phone charger and it worked great. That’s enough to watch three movies back to back.Ĭharging takes five hours via the included 5W charger, but now that the Fire HD 8 has a USB-C socket it can accept up to 15W of charging power, which reduces the full-charge time to about three hours. The Fire HD 8 will last almost nine hours of watching video streamed over wifi, or longer if the videos are downloaded beforehand. The same goes for games, including graphically intensive ones such as Real Racing.īattery life is solid for a small and low-cost tablet. Switching between apps can be a bit sluggish, but once they are loaded they perform as expected. Generally it performs fine, handling complex websites such as the Guardian well enough. The faster processor and more RAM of the standard version of the Fire HD 8 make it noticeably faster than the model it replaces. It’s also available in a “Plus” model with 3GB of RAM and wireless charging. It is 30% faster than the two-year-old model it replaces and has 0.5GB more RAM, for a total of 2GB. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The GuardianĪmazon’s Fire tablets have never been star performers, and the Fire HD 8 is no exception. With the microSD card slot you can quickly add lots of cheap storage.

How to use a kindle fire 8