Amazon Fire HD 10in review: Is this the best cheap 10in tablet around?

It’s oh-so-tempting to compare tablets such as the new Amazon Fire HD 10in directly with the competition: the likes of the Apple iPad mini, say, or the Google Nexus 9. Even, at a stretch, the £99 Tesco Hudl 2 – if it was available

It’s tempting, but also wrong.

You can, of course, line them up and look at the specs. Compare the cameras, the screen quality, whether or not there’s a microSD slot (for the first time, this Fire tablet has one). But, in truth, the only way to work out whether the Fire HD 10 is right for you is to consider how it fits into your Amazon life. If you don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime then, unless you like bad jokes, head to Go and collect your £200.

If, on the other hand, you pay £79 per year for Amazon Prime, there are plenty of reasons to like this tablet.

The first is that it’s a great way to watch movies. There’s just enough bezel at the left and right extremes for fingers to rest, the screen pumps out vivid colours, the built-in speakers pack enough grunt to enhance the action (and don’t distort the volume), while the processor can more than keep up with demanding scenes.

It’s helped by being so light. Considering there’s a 10.1in display here, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to hold for long periods. As part of the in-depth, strenuous, real-world testing I’m sure you’ve come to expect from Alphr, I watched an hour’s worth of Rush lying on the bed and didn’t notice the 432g weight at all.

Amazon Fire HD 10in review: Battery life

Battery life is pretty decent, too. You can expect around nine hours if you’re just watching video, and bear in mind that you can now download films from Amazon Instant Video. If you have a long plane journey, or need something to entertain the kids for that slog of a drive, then the Fire HD 10 is your friend.

This is where the microSD slot comes in very handy. You can buy 64GB cards for £15 from, well, Amazon, which means buying the 16GB version of the Fire won’t hamstring it. With even a few handfuls of apps installed, there was only 11GB of internal storage available from the theoretical maximum of 12.8GB. Note that the 720p version of Rush, a two-hour film, consumed 3.8GB of space.

If the Fire HD 10 is an excellent partner for video, though, its charms start to wane elsewhere. It’s fine for reading books, although I found myself switching from portrait mode because the 16:9 aspect ratio screen extended too far – it was more comfortable to read books in two-column format when held in a landscape position. Personally, I prefer to read on a Kindle Paperwhite, or even an old-style Kindle without a built-in light.

Amazon Fire HD 10in review: Performance and screen quality

Nor is it the very best choice for games. While I found both Jetpack Joyride and Bloody and Glory played well, a single-core score of 773 in Geekbench falls a shade behind the Tesco Hudl 2; a multi-core score of 1,512 means it’s a full 25% slower. It’s a good gaming device rather than a great one.

This can be forgiven, but it’s a sign that Amazon isn’t making full use of the quad-core Mediatek processor inside. It’s held back by a slightly miserly 1GB of RAM, but even then I wasn’t expecting the amount of judder I experienced in daily use. Most of the time, the Fire 10 feels fast, but then you pull up on the list of Apps and it stutters. I found exactly the same problem when browsing data-intensive sites such as The Guardian.

This is also where you notice the 10in panel’s 1,280 x 800 resolution. It’s absolutely fine if you’re watching video, but there’s an obvious graininess to web pages, especially if you’re used to highly pixel-dense phone screens or Retina iPads. Nor is it the most accurate of panels: it hit just 81.8% of the sRGB colour gamut in our tests. None of these are necessarily killer problems, but they do make the Kindle HD 10 feel like a budget tablet.

Amazon Fire HD 10in review: Software

That brings me to Fire OS, now updated to version 5, the aspect of Amazon Fire tablets many people find the most disturbing. It’s Amazon’s own version of Android, but Google’s engineers will find little familiar here other than the list view of installed apps.

Think of it instead as a way to browse your Amazon content. Swipe left and you’ll see your downloaded books, recently watched films and videos, games, a shopfront for Amazon itself, apps, music, audiobooks and a selection of magazines and papers on Newsstand.

Each section heading attempts to draw you in with recently viewed, downloaded or read items, with what Amazon hopes will be a tantalising glimpse at other morsels: newly added films on Prime, for example, or books it recommends.

What you won’t find is Google Play, or indeed any Google apps. Click on Maps, for instance, and you’ll see the unfamiliar mapping style of Nokia’s HERE offering. This delivers all the mapping and routing capabilities of Google’s Maps, but it’s less easy to use. There’s no Chrome web browser – you have to use Amazon’s own Silk browser instead. Most agonisingly, perhaps, there’s no YouTube or Drive.

Elsewhere, it’s more hit and miss. There’s a BBC Sport app and Netflix, but no Sky Go or BT Sport. Plus, try and download the Instagram app and you’ll be hit with a “This app is not compatible with your device” message. Clumsy.

If and when you do fire up the camera, be prepared to be underwhelmed. Amazon has gone for intense, oversaturated colours to cover up, the cynic in me might argue, the lack of detail and high amount of noise in the shots. The front-facing camera is fine for Skype, but the rear camera is very much a tickbox.

Amazon Fire HD 10in review: Family features

Of course, this may not matter to you – and don’t forget that integration with Amazon’s free Underground app store is built into this Kindle. You could definitely argue that this adds to its value, even if it is possible for other Android tablet owners to install Underground if they jump through various hoops.

Underground helps to make this feel like a family-friendly tablet, though. The fact you can allow your children free passage to download anything marked with the “Actually Free” band is one fewer thing to worry about, safe in the knowledge that your credit card won’t be filled with surprise in-app purchases.

Amazon has made other efforts to create a family-friendly device. You can give separate logins to your partner and up to four children, with the kids’ accounts controlled by age. You can then restrict the time period and even allow them to earn playtime by using educational apps for a certain amount of time.

For £1.99 per month you can even give one of your children access to an “unlimited” number of kid-friendly apps, books and videos (£4.99 for up to three children). Note, though, that there are only two age bands – three to five and six to eight – and the eight is generous. My eight-year-old was not impressed by series one of Lego Friends.

All of this highlights another problem with Amazon’s approach. It appears to think that children stop ageing at about seven, with even my 14-year-old’s account restricted to a simple interface that works beautifully for infant schoolers, but made him look at it once and hand the Fire back to me with a dismissive shake of the head. Suddenly, the fact you can only have two adult accounts looks like a massive hindrance.

Amazon Fire HD 10in review: Verdict

So, should you buy it? Well, weirdly enough, that’s entirely down to you. The two biggest plus points are that 10in screen and ease of use: a novice could pick up the Amazon Fire HD 10 and be watching their Amazon videos within seconds. If all you want to do is browse the web and view Amazon content, its limiting approach has undoubted merit.

If, on the other hand, you want something a little more versatile, there are more tempting options. Sacrifice 2in and the Tesco Hudl 2 gives you change, just, from £100. If you’re willing to forgo an inch of screen size, and are happy with a 4:3 ratio, then the Google Nexus 9 is your friend. When it costs £200 from Argos, which it does right now, it’s far more tempting, even to Amazon Prime subscribers like me.

• Don’t want to spend £170 on a budget tablet? Why not consider Amazon’s new £50 bargain, the Amazon Fire?