Amazon Fire 7 (2017) review: A bargain tablet that has now been superseded
The 2017 Amazon Fire tablet has been replaced
Pros
- Super cheap
- A great choice for kids
- Easy to carry around
Cons
- Sluggish performance
Amazon updates its tablets every two years or so but the upgrades are usually minor. In 2017 those upgrades came in the form of a mild spec boost and the addition of Amazon’s AI assistant, Alexa, to the tablet’s features. It’s since been replaced with the 2019 Amazon Fire 7, though, which again, sees a minor change of specification, including a faster CPU, more storage and hands-free Alexa.
In its time, though, the 2017 Amazon Fire 7 was the best-value tablet around. To find out why read the rest of our original review below.
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Amazon Fire tablet review: What you need to know
At £50 (and frequently discounted throughout the year), Amazon’s cheap and cheerful 7in tablet sits in a league of its own.
With better connectivity, reasonable battery life and integration with Amazon Alexa, the Fire is an excellent tablet for those on a tight budget. With a Kids Edition also available to parents, the Fire will appeal to everyone.
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Amazon Fire tablet review: Price and storage options
The Fire 7 tablet is available in two storage options – 8GB and 16GB – which can be found for £50 and £60 respectively.
Both models come with and without “Special Offers”. These are adverts that are displayed on the lockscreen. To get rid of them, you’ll need to pay an additional £10, resulting in a £60 (8GB) and £70 (16GB) price tag.
The tablets come in four different colours: Black, Canary Yellow, Marine Blue and Punch Red.
Amazon Fire tablet review: Kids Edition
Amazon’s Fire tablet comes in two different editions. You can buy the tablet on its own for £50 (£60 for the 16GB version) or the Kids Edition for £100. The tablet hardware itself is no different, but for the extra cash you do get a one-year subscription to Fire for Kids Unlimited, a “Kid-Proof” case and a two-year “worry-free” warranty. Note, too, that the Kids Edition tablet comes with only 16GB of storage.
Fire for Kids Unlimited grants you a one-year subscription to content aimed at kids aged 3-12. It gives kids unlimited access to thousands of age-appropriate books, videos, educational apps and games with no ads or in-app purchases.
It’s ideal for parents who want to give their children something to watch, without having to worry about “grown-up stuff”. It also ties into the parental controls on offer by Amazon, giving you peace of mind for your children to safely browse the internet. The tablet also lets parents set daily time limits and bedtimes, so there are no late-night Sesame Street binges.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the cost isn’t much different from buying the tablet on its own and adding the service later, though – especially if you’re a subscriber to Amazon Prime. Normally, Prime members pay £1.99/mth for one child’s subscription and £4.99/mth for up to four children.
The Kid-Proof case, however, is truly a marvel. Due to its design and material construction, the Fire 7 Kids Edition can be chucked around. Upon receiving it for review, I performed several drop tests, and it survived by bouncing off the floor. If you’re getting this for your kids, you won’t have to worry about it breaking, and even if your kids do end up cracking the screen, Amazon offers a two-year worry-free guarantee. This means that you’ll be covered for two years, no questions asked.
Amazon Fire tablet review: Performance
The Fire ships with either 8GB or 16GB of storage, although there is a microSD slot to upgrade storage space. This is handy, particularly as a 32GB microSD card can be bought for less than £13. Ultimately, twice the storage for £10 more is worth it, and 16GB is enough storage for light use and web browsing, whereas 8GB really isn’t.
Start using the Fire, however, and it’s clear to see how Amazon has been able to make it so cheap. There might be a MediaTek MT8127 quad-core processor running at 1.3GHz, but it’s beyond sluggish. In Peacekeeper, a test of browser performance, the Fire could only manage a pitiful 283 – easily the worst score of any tablet Expert Reviews saw even in 2015, and a quarter of what Tesco’s £100 Hudl 2 is capable of.
Even the three-year-old Nexus 7 managed over 100 points more overall. This translates to choppy scrolling, particularly on media-heavy web pages, with lots of re-draws if you have multiple tabs open at once. It doesn’t help that you’re forced to use Silk, Amazon’s own web browser, as Google apps such as Chrome aren’t available. It has most of the features you would expect, but performance doesn’t come close.
Everyday performance suffers on account of the underpowered chipset too. Geekbench single- and multi-core results of 356 and 1,143 respectively are among the lowest scores we’ve seen for a long time, again falling behind Tesco’s Hudl 2. Loading even simple apps can take several seconds, as will opening the Recent menu or returning to the homescreen.
At first, it’s easy to think you simply didn’t tap the right place onscreen, but after a while it’s clear the device simply can’t keep up with your inputs. Once you’re in an app, things are mostly smooth, but animations and transitions are still disappointingly choppy.
Amazon Fire tablet review: Design
In addition to more memory, Amazon has also introduced three vibrant colours. They’re nice and bright, and certainly look much more fun than the traditional black version. This may be important if you’re planning on buying a tablet for a child. While it’s good to see these changes, they don’t materially change my opinion of the tablet or affect its performance, as you can see from the rest of my review.
It doesn’t even look bargain-basement when you take it out of the box. Yes, the screen bezels are a little on the chunky side, and it’s surprisingly heavy given the size, but otherwise it’s actually not bad at all. The matte-plastic finish on the back is actually preferable to the glossy fingerprint magnet on the back of the Fire HD 10.
Amazon Fire tablet review: Display
The Fire was never going to have an amazing screen, given its bargain-basement price, so in many ways a meagre 59.3% sRGB colour gamut coverage isn’t surprising. It’s easily one of the lowest scores seen from a tablet, and 20% behind the Hudl 2. It’s a similar story in our other objective tests, with a fairly average maximum brightness of 330.2cd/m2 and a rather high 0.34cd/m2 black level that leaves darker images looking rather grey and milky.
A contrast ratio of 959:1 isn’t terrible, however; it means images and video have a surprising amount of depth, even if the colours aren’t very accurate. Subjectively, the screen looks grainy, and while viewing angles are respectable, the very low 1,024 x 600 resolution makes text look blocky and difficult to read in smaller fonts. Its readability has been improved since its 2016 release, with the new 2017 Fire 7 handling smaller text a lot better than before.
Amazon Fire tablet review: Camera
The 2-megapixel rear camera hardly paints photos in the best light, but then the sensor is far from industry-leading anyway. Images taken outdoors are seriously lacking in detail and colours appear to be very washed out. Overall, shots are incredibly grainy and photos are filled with visual noise and artefacts.
There is an HDR mode, but it takes around a second to capture an image, making camera shake something of an issue, and the results aren’t any more lifelike than photos taken with HDR disabled.
Unsurprisingly there’s no flash, so you’re reliant on natural light when shooting indoors. As soon as you dim the lights, noise levels fly through the roof and details plummet. It struggled to find any texture in our standard still-life when the lamps were switched off, leaving huge parts of the image in shadow. With the lights on, results were a little better, but any modern smartphone will have a superior camera sensor.
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Amazon Fire tablet review: Connectivity
The Fire tablet comes with dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi. Its inclusion of the 5GHz band is a fantastic addition, and for a £50 tablet is simply unbelievable. Most budget devices don’t have dual-band support, and as a result you’ll experience dramatically faster speeds when downloading content, streaming your favourite TV shows and even watching YouTube videos.
At the top of the device, you’ll find a power/lock button, which sits next to a micro-USB port, a 3.5mm headphone jack and volume rocker. The microSD card slot is on the right, and the dual downward-firing speaker grilles are on the left. The Fire tablet also allows you to connect to other devices via Bluetooth.
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Amazon Fire tablet review: FireOS with Amazon Alexa
Amazon’s custom version of Android has always divided users; anyone heavily invested in the Amazon ecosystem can appreciate having quick access to their ebooks, music, video and cloud storage, but the lack of Google Play and apps that other Android users take for granted are deal-breakers for many others (although you can install Google’s suite of apps, if you can find the APK files). Amazon is still sitting at Android Lollipop (running FireOS 5.4.0.0), although this still offers a sensible middle ground between the familiar Android UI and its own layout, which makes the whole tablet much more user-friendly.
The old carousel-style homescreen has gone, replaced with a much more familiar app grid layout that makes finding third-party apps much easier. Each Amazon service still has its own dedicated homescreen, just a swipe or two to the left or right. If you have a Prime subscription, it’s a great way to access instant video content or Prime music, and Kindle owners will have instant access to their books through the Cloud library.
That being said, there are still some glaring omissions in terms of app support, most notably Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive, and Amazon’s Appstore still has a long way to go to match the selection available from Google Play.
The 2017 tablet also brings Amazon Alexa. You can access the voice assistant by holding down the home button (if you prefer, this can be toggled off by navigating to Settings | Device Options) or by navigating to the dedicated Alexa app. Here, you’ll see all your recent searches and Google-style cards with rich information, such as weather information in your area.
At £50, the Fire 7 is one of the cheapest Alexa devices you can currently own. By utilising its screen, the Fire offers much more than the £45 Amazon Echo Dot 2. So, if you’ll be using Alexa a lot, the Fire 7 might seem like a sensible choice.
Amazon Fire tablet review: Verdict
Despite its shortcomings, the Fire tablet isn’t currently faced with competition. Given its super-low price, its closest match would be the Tesco Hudl 2, which is now discontinued.
If you’re looking for a cheap tablet to give to your children, it is definitely worth considering the £100 Kids Edition, as the two-year warranty and tough Kid-Proof case make it arguably better value for cautious parents.
For anyone looking for a first tablet, or even a cheap second device for travel, university or the kitchen, its £50 price point makes it a no-brainer. At this price, it’s even worth considering as a dedicated Alexa device with a screen.
| Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Quad-core 1.3GHz ARM MT8127 |
| RAM | 1GB |
| Screen size | 7in |
| Screen resolution | 1,024×600 |
| Screen type | IPS |
| Front camera | VGA |
| Rear camera | 2-megapixel |
| Flash | No |
| GPS | No |
| Compass | No |
| Storage (free) | 8/16GB |
| Memory card slot (supplied) | microSD (256GB) |
| Wi-Fi | 802.11b/g/n |
| Bluetooth | Yes |
| NFC | No |
| Wireless data | No |
| Dimensions | 115x192x9.6mm |
| Weight | 295g |
| Features | |
| Operating system | FireOS 5.4.0.0 |
| Battery size | 2,950mAh |
