New flame
TABLET | £160 (without ads) from Amazon www.snipca.com/48929
Believe it or not, this latest version of Amazon’s popular 10in tablet is its 13th. And as ever, this Fire HD 10 can be yours for a very reasonable price.
Here, we’re reviewing the 32GB version without ads, but if you can live with the constant promotions, you can save £10. These tend to appear on the home screen so aren’t too obtrusive, but we think it’s worth a tenner to bypass them altogether.
If you want more storage there’s also a 64GB version (£180 with ads or £190 without). That extra £30 to double up your storage is probably worth it if you can afford to, particularly if you tend to keep a lot of apps, videos and music on your device.
In this price range its main rival is the Honor Pad X9 (£149 from www.snipca. com/48636, reviewed in Issue 674). In terms of performance, the two sit at the bottom end of the tablet speed scale, which is where we’d expect tablets that cost less than £200. In fact, in benchmark tests that push a device’s graphics capabilities to its limits the Fire HD could barely muster more than one frame per second. However, when we ran popular albeit less demanding games – such as Jurassic World: The Game and Roblox – they performed perfectly fine.
The processor also performed below average in similarly challenging tests, running at around one third of the speed of the processor in a 10th generation iPad.. It even stuttered occasionally when carrying out basic jobs such as browsing Amazon’s operating system. However, things seemed to pick up when we opened individual apps, meaning it copes well with web browsing and email.
If you’re used to having a 120Hz screen on your phone, then you’ll find the 60Hz refresh rate here somewhat sluggish. There are no such worries when watching videos, however. They play smoothly and look great. The screen covers 90 per cent of the sRGB colour standard and 67 per cent of DCI-P3.
Audio quality is much better than we expected. It makes a decent stab at producing punchy bass and, while trebles can sound a tad harsh, the overall output is impressive. The same applies to the camera, which does a great job of capturing 1080p video from either the front or rear 5-megapixel camera. Its microphone captures your voice clearly, too, which is great for video calls.
There’s even the opportunity to do some real work on this tablet, as Amazon sells a compatible Bluetooth keyboard case for £53 (www.snipca.com/48932). Amazon didn’t
