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Battery life
- Terrible battery life
- Performance improves substantially with Wi-Fi off
A bit like a Lamborghini Aventador guzzles fuel like it’s going out of fashion, the Amazon Fire 7 (2019) loves electricity. In fact, it adores it so much, it consumes a significant amount while sitting idle. Needless to say, battery life is horrendous.
We were unable to squeeze a full day’s worth of use out of it, once. The rest of the time it seemed to make it until around 4PM before conking out, after being unhooked at 8AM.
The worst bit? That’s without constant use. Out of that eight hour window, we used the slate for a total of four – two were spent reading on a brief flight to Nice Côte d'Azur for Cannes Film Festival 2019, and two were spent consuming video and surfing the web.
We continued those viewing habits during our time there and on the trip back, and were met with consistent results each and every time.
Keen to inch more life out of the Amazon Fire 7 (2019), we went full commando – disabling Wi-Fi and uninstalling applications that consume a significant amount of power in the background, including Facebook and Instagram.
The result surprised us, with the device lasting four an astonishing nine hours of usage, spent exclusively reading through the Amazon Kindle application, over a three-day period.
Camera
- 2MP cameras on both front and back
- Poor quality, but the front one isn't completely useless
The 2MP rear camera on the Amazon Fire 7 (2019) feels like a bit of an unnecessary addition, so much so we racked our brains trying to come up with a situation where you’d actually need to use it instead of your smartphone and came up with nothing.
That is, unless your handset has a VGA shooter, in which case the Fire 7 would be a considerable improvement. But that won’t be the case for the average consumer.
It feels like Amazon knows the snapper won’t be used, too. The company hasn’t invested a whole load of resources into fleshing out the hardware with some killer software features.
It’s all rather basic: you can flip between the front and rear shooters, flick a toggle to start recording video, and that’s about it. Seeing as it will probably mostly be children who use the camera, the run-of-the-mill, basic feature set should suffice.
The 2MP front-facing camera, on the other hand, could prove to be slightly more useful – opening the door to video calling.
It can also be accessed by social media applications, such as Instagram and Snapchat, making the Fire 7 (2019) the ideal choice for those wanting to read a book by day, and connect with friends and family by night. You may get some complaints that you’re a little blurry, though.
