Amazon's Fire HD 8 - New Cheapest Tablet is a steal at $89

Amazon’s latest tablet, the Fire HD 8, costs just $89, making it one of the cheapest tablets on the market. It’s well-built and comes with Amazon’s walled garden of services already built in, but there are trade-offs to be made if you want to leave those confines. For example, although it supports Bluetooth and WiFi, it doesn’t have access to Android apps like Google Play, so you won’t be able to use many popular apps until Amazon finds a way around that.

Amazon Content, Web browsing and Limited Games

The Fire HD 8 isn’t built for more than browsing Amazon content, reading books and magazines and playing a few light games. If you're looking for a full-featured Android tablet to do real work or play graphics-intensive games, you'll need to spend significantly more money. The 4GB of internal storage can fill up quickly with songs and videos, so be sure to buy an SD card. This tablet doesn't come with headphones; it relies on a pair of speakers that put out decent sound quality but aren't very loud when cranked up. Like other Fire tablets, there are no volume buttons. You adjust volume by swiping up or down on a small tab at the top of your screen. At 2 pounds, this tablet feels heavy enough to support one-handed use in portrait mode but not quite as sturdy as Apple's iPad Mini (1 pound). Its glossy plastic back cover easily picks up fingerprints and smudges from fingers—and any other surface it comes into contact with.

Android based OS

When you open it up you get to Amazon's custom interface over Android 9 now this is not Google Android this is Amazon's own Android based OS which does not have the Google App Store in it this is really important Amazon's App Store has a lot fewer apps than Google's app store does and it's hard to install apps that aren't on Amazon's App Store or from an email or from a third party site. So if you want access to all of your favorite apps like Facebook Instagram Snapchat Twitter all of those things are going to be difficult if not impossible with Amazon's Fire HD 8. The good news is though that if you're someone who doesn't care about having access to all of those apps or games and everything then there are some great benefits here. For example, Amazon offers unlimited cloud storage for photos so they'll back up every single photo that you take with your Fire HD 8 onto their servers so that way they can be accessed anywhere as long as you're logged into your account. So that could be very useful for people who don't want to worry about losing their photos. You also get 12 months of Kindle Unlimited for free with your purchase of a Fire HD 8. This gives you access to hundreds of thousands of books audio books magazines comics newspapers and more. It also comes preloaded with lots of other content like movies TV shows music playlists audiobooks podcasts radio stations etc. And while none of these things are necessarily bad they do kind of highlight one big problem with Amazon's new tablet: it's designed entirely around Amazon services and content which means that if you don't use any Amazon services or buy any content from them then there isn't much reason to buy one.

Third Party Apps

The Amazon Fire HD 6 may be cheap, but it is still built with an unlocked bootloader, making it easy to root and install apps from sources other than Amazon. If you’re not interested in getting your hands dirty with rooting, you can get basically all of Google’s services on your Fire HD by installing some third-party apps. The Play Store (for installing apps), Chrome, and YouTube have all been ported to Amazon tablets. Still, if you’re looking for more options than just email and web browsing like on iOS devices, then buying an Android tablet won’t be enough. You’ll probably still want a smartphone or computer for most tasks.

Charging Port - C

Its charging port is the standard USB C—the first Amazon fire tablet to have it. I don’t own any other devices with USB C, so you’ll have to forgive me for not being able to tell you how it compares with micro-USB, but it feels really solid and doesn’t wobble around when you try to plug it in.

Cheapest Amongst All

Amazon released its cheapest ever Fire HD 8 tablet last week, and it retails for just $89. This puts it firmly in buy two and get one free territory—and what’s most surprising is that it’s actually well-built. If you’re looking to go cheap with your next tablet purchase, then you can do no better than Amazon’s latest offering. The cheapest tablet on offer from Google retails for $149 (the Pixel C), while Apple charges $329 for its cheapest iPad Mini 4 model. But if you want something running Android instead of iOS or are already tied into Amazon’s ecosystem of services, then Amazon has always been there to help out with some of its best products yet. The Kindle Paperwhite eReader is still my favorite eReader on sale today and it doesn't cost all that much more than an entry level Kindle Fire HD tablet—but costs significantly less than a full blown Kindle Voyage or Oasis device.

Kids App

Amazon FreeTime Unlimited gives your kids access to tens of thousands of books, apps, games, videos and educational videos for $2.99 per month. There’s also no more need to buy expensive parenting guides: Amazon has included parental controls with FreeTime that make it easy for parents to set limits for their kids and customize exactly how much time kids spend on specific activities.