Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus tablet, 8” HD Display, 64 GB, 30% faster processor, 3GB RAM, wireless charging, (2022 release), Gray

This Kindle performs great compared to the old Kindles! They have really amped up their devices, and they really have kept them versatile, super fast, and modern. With the easy to use Android OS, there's really nothing you can't do on these things because you have every app available from the Google Play Store. They are no longer an eReader, but a complete tablet, now. The screen on these things is really outstanding, and images are so crystal clear that its hard to imagine one thats better. If you're considering purchasing a tablet for a kid, don't waste your money on some outrageously expensive tablet that wouldn't perform as well as this tablet would. As someone who has a Samsung tablet and a Kindle, the Kindle is just as good, if not better, than my Samsung. It is enough for any person who uses their tablet to surf, shop, game, and conference. It really is that good! These things are most certainly worth the money!

Everything I needed it to be. Not the newest but sufficiently adequate for reading and listening to books, music, watching shows and playing games!

I already own multiple iPads and higher end Android tablets. Why did I end up buying the Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus and give it a 5 star rating? This tablet simply exceeded my expectations. I was in the market for a smaller lighter tablet to read books and manga. As good as my other tablets are, they are not easy to hold for multiple hours of reading. Holding a metal and glass tablet with a 10.6 inch screen gets tiring over a few hours. The screen on this Amazon tablet is more than adequate for reading books from the Kindle app. This is near perfect for manga since the screen size is similar to paper manga. Images and text appear nice and clear. Installing the Google Play store was easy. I need apps like Google Home, Keep, Drive, and GBoard. YouTube works just fine. My use case is rather easy to handle. I let my kids test this tablet. If it can keep up with my kids, then it can handle what I need a tablet for. When I handed this off to my kids, they just went overboard on games. They couldn't find all of the games they play in the Amazon shop store, so I'll be referencing some games from the Google Play store. Roblox is a popular app for my kids. The overall performance was good. It really depends on which game they are playing from Roblox. Piggy ran well. Broken Bones was very jittery but playable. Yeet-a-friend plays well if you disable some of the extra options for the game itself. Cookie Swirl C World is playable, but was not the smoothest. Spray Paint played well. Spider also played well. Random OBEEs splayed well. Here is the pattern I noticed with Roblox. If the game supports a large lobby, then there is a greater chance that the game runs a bit slower. I noticed that the large lobby games are running a bit slow, but my kids didn't care. They were still happily playing and winning without issues. Granny Chapter 1 and 2 play well. Gacha Life and Gacha Club ran well. Among Us ran well. They were playing more games, but I couldn't keep up with their long list. Overall, this tablet can run games well enough. It won't be as smooth as a higher end tablet, but I didn't notice any random crashes. My kids would have definitely complained about it. If you are considering this tablet for your kids to play games, you need to consider which games they are playing. Surprisingly TikTok worked well. When swiping through videos, it may take a second to load before it plays. I don't notice that issue on my other tablets. After the initial pause, the videos play well. Since reading and productivity were my main concern, it's a 5 star tablet for the price. Games are just the icing on the cake. Since I don't play them often it would not have been a concern for me. Now I have another device to hand off to my kids in those just in case situations.

This tablet is pretty good for what it is. It works well, the Plus version with 3G Ram and new processor handles multitasking and app switching quite nicely, with no time wasting performance lags. My story is that I bought this to replace a three year old Kindle Fire 7 that was just slow. As Amazon updated the Fire OS over the last three years, this fire 7 just got slower and slower, so I wanted something that could keep up. This little Fire 7 worked perfectly, except that it was bogged down and slow whenever there were stuff updating in the background or if I wanted to briefly switch between apps. The Fire 8 Plus solved my issues with the old Fire 7. No lags, no delays! I'm sure that the 3G of RAM makes a difference here. The included apps on the Fire 8 such as mail, calendar, browser, are functional but limiting. Out of the box, it could install and run Netflix, Prime Video, Kindle reader and has a built in Amazon Shop app, so that's a good start. Alexa is not required, and can be disabled/bypassed, but it cannot be uninstalled. Perfect for me because I don't use Alexa, nor do I want it listening to me. All the other amazon apps I'm not interested in using, and there is also no way to uninstall them... so there's a bunch of junk apps and shortcuts that I will ignore and will just take up space forever and never be used. So, moving on... I was able to install the Google Play store and got it to work. Now this opened up a large multitude of additional apps that can run on this device without any problems. GMail, Chrome, Contacts, Maps, Facebook, YoutubeTV, Youtube, Podcasts, Games, Calculator, Banking Apps, Gboard, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, ToDo, Word, Excel, AdobePdf, Roku, MyRadar, Pandora, Mlb. All working quite nicely, installed from the Play store and the Play store is keeping them updated. NICE! I was able to set Chrome as my default browser, and GBoard as my default keyboard. NICE! Google calendar would install, but I could not get it to work. I can live with that as I use outlook for my calendar. YoutubeTV works well, but I could not get the floating picture to work when switching apps. I'm not a big fan of this feature in YTV, so I can live without that. Now, there are a few apps that the Play store just will not install on this device. But that does not mean that those apps won't work, just that the Play store can't install and update them. So far, the two that I have run into are the Royal Caribbean app and the Giant food stores app. I could download the APKs from apkmirror and they worked perfectly. Good enough for me. I use these apps infrequently, so I created a chrome bookmark to the apkmirror links so that I can manually update them periodically. One downside is the physical size - I'm still getting used to it. I was used to the smaller size of the Fire 7 - it fit well in my hand and was compact enough to carry in a large pocket. Unfortunately, the current F7 does not have as much RAM, which is needed for multitasking and fast app switching. The Fire 8 Plus is about 3/4 inch wider and taller. Thickness is the same. The size is clunky and edges curved and smooth, so when using one-handed and I was afraid I would drop it while I waited for the case that I ordered. Once I got the case... ahhhh... I felt more comfortable holding it, and the size is less of an issue. Although the F8 is too big to fit easilly in a pocket. Another downside is the launcher. It is not possible to change the default app launcher, so you are stuck with the super simple one provided by Amazon. Every installed app appears on the home page, so it can get large and crowded. But it does allow me to arrange my apps in named groups, so it can be organized. It is basic and functional, so it will do. So far - so good. For an inexpensive tablet, the workarounds for the Google apps are good and worth it. Hope it stays this way.