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Battery life
- Slow to charge
- 10 hours of ‘mixed-use’ quoted
In day-to-day use, the battery life of the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2018) is adequate, if nothing more.
Running the TechRadar battery test we found the battery dropped by 20%, which is not among the best scores found, and slightly below Amazon's claim of up to 10 hours of video on a charge. This is just enough to get through a transatlantic flight, so frequent flyers be warned.
Perhaps the biggest bugbear most users will encounter is the glacial rate of charging. This is one for an overnight juice, given that on average it will take 6 hours to go from 0 to 100%. Those looking for a quick top up before heading out will need to check their expectations.
Saying this, how often you'll be charging it will depend entirely on how you use it. We found that with two 45 minute commutes, with Wi-Fi enabled and with an hour of streaming locally stored music to Bluetooth earphones, the battery would still be at 80% by 6pm.
This isn’t a device which will see you through a nightmare 20-hour day of traveling, nor is it something which can be charged in a rush. With planning and care however, it should fit nicely into the routines of most who may choose to purchase it.
Camera
- 2MP cameras on both the front and rear
- Bad, terrible, awful pictures
For reasons both bewildering and terrifying, many members of the public opt to use tablets as their primary photographic devices. Though there are some slates which are beginning to adopt sensors which push out reasonable images, the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2018) is not one of those, for it has a Bad Camera.
That is to say a camera which defines the very notion of what it means to have a poor snapper, the kind of effort which seemingly exists merely to provide a karmic opposite to the likes of the Google Pixel 3, to provide balance to the universe.
Detail is non-existent, colors are muted and noise enters every scene. The quality of the lens is clearly an issue, given that images captured tend to look as though they were hastily snapped through a tiny, dirty porthole.
On the whole, there is little to say about the cameras on the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2018), other than that they should not be used, ever.
At least the viewfinder is simple to navigate through, offering a ‘capture’ button and a toggle for more advanced settings, including a timer, a grid layout, a camera switch and, rather optimistically, a HDR function.
