Amazon has announced a refresh of the Fire HD 8 with a vastly cheaper price and new innards, and it may be the first tablet from the retail giant that’s worth picking up. While it’s all powered by a quad-core 1.3GHz processor and 1.5GB of RAM. Internal storage in the $90 model goes up to 16 gigabytes from 8, plus support for a microSD card.
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The new Fire tablet has 12 hours of battery life (up from 8 hours from the previous version) and the capacity for an additional 200 GB of storage compared with 128 GB of additional storage with the previous version.
All-day battery-4,750 mAh battery for up to 12 hours of mixed use battery life for a full day of power.
Amazon has also significantly cut the Fire tablet’s price.
Fire HD 8 stereo speakers are custom-tuned with Dolby Audio for immersive, high-quality sound. Alexa will be able to answer all the questions she can handle on Echo devices, including news alerts, weather, playing music and, naturally, shopping through Amazon.
On Deck-For Prime members, On Deck automatically keeps your Fire tablet current with popular Prime movies and TV shows, as well as Amazon Original Series.
Amazon-exclusive features-ASAP, X-Ray, Second Screen, Family Library, Amazon FreeTime, Prime Video downloads, Blue Shade, Word Runner, and more.
Amazon is offering the new tablet in four colors: Black, magenta, blue, and tangerine.
Those are the people Amazon makes Fire tablets for…? When connected to Wi-Fi, simply long-press the home button and ask Alexa to play your favorite song, open a game, or read you the latest audiobook-Alexa provides quick access to the entertainment you want. These skills allow the assistant to interact with third party apps (i.e. order a pizza from Dominos or summon an Uber.). She’s also coming to the Fire HD 10, Fire and last year’s Fire HD 8 tablets via a free over-the-air software update in the coming months. There will be an audible response to the Alexa query as well as, in some cases, a visual response (the weather forecast should appear on the Fire HD 8’s screen). It’ll start shipping September 21.
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Front- and rear-facing cameras with free, unlimited cloud storage for all photos taken on Fire devices. The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Amazon had been working on an Alexa tablet-like computer that would allow users to call up websites, videos, or images even when “their hands are covered in flour”. Until now Alexa has only been available on the Echo speaker, the smaller Echo Dot, the Amazon Tap speaker, and Amazon’s newer Fire TV gadgets, while the Alexa mobile app has served as a manager app for the AI on those pieces of hardware.
