Amazon Updates the Fire HD 10 Tablet with a Lower Price and a 1080p Display
For the past several years Amazon has been shaving the price of their new Fire tablets without significantly improving the specs. They bucked that trend today with the launch of the new Fire HD 10 tablet.
This tablet is the first Amazon tablet in a very long time to live up to its HD branding. It features a 1080p (1920 x 1200) display, a slightly faster CPU, twice the RAM, and a lower price tag.
This $150 tablet ships on 11 October 2017.
The Fire HD 10 runs the latest version of Amazon’s Android OS on a quad-core 1.8GHz CPU with 2GB RAM and either 32GB or 64GB of storage. It has Wifi, Bluetooth, stereo speakers, and a microSD card slot.
The cameras aren’t quite as good as before (the front camera is still VGA, but the rear has been downgraded from 5MP to 2MP) but in just about every way this tablet is a lot better than its predecessor. Amazon claims it is 30% faster and yet still offers up to 10 hours of battery life.
Like Amazon’s other tablets, the Fire HD 10 ships with Alexa, Amazon’s in-home spy. But where I have to press and hold the home button on my Fire tablet to trigger Alexa, the Fire HD 10 will be getting a hands-free mode similar to the Amazon Echo (it’s coming in a later update).
In the hands-free mode, your tablet is listening to you all the time so that Alexa can answer any question as soon as you (or a TV show) mention its name. You can ask Alexa to play a song, pause a movie, read audiobooks, answer questions, show your calendar, or control your smart home from your Fire tablet.
For the first time in several years, Amazon has released a tablet that is clearly worth upgrading to.
Will you be getting one?
Comments
1 September 19, 2017 um 11:37 am
That price appears to be with special offers (aka ads).
Do you know how these offers are integrated? Can you bypass them easily by installing a different launcher or something? Or do you really need to buy the more expensive ad free version from Amazon?
BDR September 19, 2017 um 12:16 pm
Nope. Only 2 ways to bypass. Pay or root.
Chris Meadows September 19, 2017 um 11:53 pm
Actually, there are three ways to bypass. Apart from paying or rooting, you can go to Amazon support chat and complain about the ads, and if you’ve been an Amazon member for a while the odds are good they’ll offer to remove the ads for free.
That’s how I got ads removed from my Fire 7 and my Fire HD 8. I didn’t even have to hint around or anything; I just complained that the ads were for services I couldn’t see myself using, and were annoying and distracting, and it wasn’t too long before the guy asked, "Would you like to remove the ads altogether?" and said he’d waive the fees because I’d been a valuable Amazon customer for so long.
If it doesn’t work the first time, you can just try again until you get a chat agent who’ll be amenable to removing them for you.
John September 19, 2017 um 12:24 pm
Looks like a good tablet at a great price point and I might when my Fire HDX 8.9″ tablet eventually gives up the ghost. However, it’s still going strong after 4 years of almost continual use, proven to be a great purchase.
Andrys October 1, 2017 um 2:41 am
John — My 3rd Gen (2013) Kindle Fire HDX 8.9″ tablet is still just going strong, though I’ve dropped it countless times (in a case). It has higher resolution (on a smaller screen) at 2560 x 1600 (339 ppi), a quad-core 2.2GHz processor. No microSD card slot tho, but I did go for the 64 GB version. 8MP rear-facing camera. No Alexa, which may be a blessing. Did they drop simple mirroring on the new ones? Didn’t see it mentioned. I see Fling is supported, which is better anyway. The display is just amazing. I got a used 64 GB iPad 4 for music scores etc and while it’s very smooth, it’s super heavy, not easy to hold, and doesn’t have the extreme sharpness that the HDX has. These days I mainly watch live news on it or DVR’d stuff via Directv (saves a lot of electricity $$ from the big TV).
Randy Lea September 19, 2017 um 3:59 pm
I have a bunch of Fire tablets, they all work for me, mostly reading, watching videos, weather, etc. The recent Fire 8 is great, only minor complaints are it’s a bit slow, like to have more RAM and a faster CPU. This new Fire 10 has a faster CPU 1.8 Ghz vs 1.3 Ghz, and RAM is 2G vs 1.5G in the Fire 8. Should help performance and switching apps quite a bit. I’d like to get my hands on one to see how it performs. I think I saw that the warrantee is 1 year, a lot better than 90 days.
Amazon pretty much always has their Fire tablets on sale Black Friday, so I’d look for one of these to go for $120-$125 on the sale. I haven’t touched one yet, but it looks like this will be a huge bargain in a few weeks.
My one concern is the size. I really liked their old 6 inch tablet, pretty much the size of a paperback book, so I’m wondering how reading on a 10 inch tablet works.
John September 19, 2017 um 7:39 pm
When Amazon had a sale a few weeks back I picked up one of the new Fire 7’s for $30.00 as an e-reader backup and it works great for that.
Chuck September 20, 2017 um 11:28 am
Randy:
A few years ago I had a 10 inch Sony tablet. And unless you have large hands to grip the tablet, that size is not good for reading.
Randy Lea September 20, 2017 um 1:24 pm
My first Fire tablet was the Fire 6. I switched from reading on a Kindle to it, loved it. Its easy to read with just the right hand to hold it, use the right thumb to flip pages. I was really disappointed when the next year they came out with the really low spec’ed Fire 7, I wanted an upgrade to the Fire 6, mainly more RAM and faster CPU, and an SD slot. I prefer that Amazon used a bit more expensive components in their tablets, I’d pay an extra $30 for it.
I still bought the Fire 7 for $35, how can you not? My wife has one, uses it for a clock.
Randy Lea September 19, 2017 um 9:37 pm
One of my Fire tablets is the Fire 7. I have a 64G SD card, holds a lot of stuff. I take it when I travel, Netflix lets you download some of its content, I store that on the SD card. It works fine for videos, books, audiobooks, etc., not that great for web surfing.
Also, I have the Google Play store app installed, with a lot of the Google apps and apps not available from Amazon. I got mine for $35 a couple of years ago on Black Friday, not a great tablet, but very usable, and it’s a great bargain. The Fire 8 is a lot better value, in my opinion.
Chris Meadows September 19, 2017 um 11:57 pm
I think the Amazon Fire tablet is basically the Model T of tablets. Henry Ford’s Model T was about as bare-bones a car as you could get, and there were a lot of scoffers back in the day. But it was also insanely popular because its low low price meant that suddenly practically anybody could afford a car.
There aren’t a lot of other tablets in the Fire’s price range that have decent build quality and recent operating systems, and backing from a reputable manufacturer. (Yes, Fire OS is based on Android Lollipop, but Amazon’s engineers keep it under continual development and update, including necessary security fixes, so it’s not rife with all the vulnerabilities inherent in older versions of plain-vanilla Android.)
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