Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7″ review

While the original Kindle Fire HD was pretty good value, it looked a little cheap and the hardware couldn’t cope with Amazon’s own interface. A year-on from that release and mobile technology has changed significantly, so Amazon’s back with its budget update, the Kindle Fire HDX 7″.

The first thing you notice about the new tablet is that it’s smaller than its predecessor. Where the Kindle Fire HD had a significant amount of bezel, with its screen looking small in the middle, the HDX has a much smaller bezel, making the 7in screen appear bigger. It’s not as slim as the Nexus 7, but it no longer feels so bulky.

Amazon has also redesigned the case completely, with a nice soft-touch plastic back. It has angled edges to the back, which slope up to the side of the case. These not only make the Fire HDX more comfortable to hold, but also hold the power and volume buttons where they’re easy to reach while you’re holding the tablet in landscape mode. With Amazon cutting the weight by almost 100g, the 303g Kindle Fire HDX 7″ is now a lot more comfortable to hold, too.

AMAZON KINDLE FIRE HDX 7 SCREEN

Although the same size screen is still in the Kindle Fire HDX 7″, Amazon has upped the resolution from 1,280×800 to 1,920×1,200 – the same resolution as used by the Google Nexus 7 (2013). This gives the screen a high pixel density of 323ppi. It’s an immediate and obvious difference, with the high pixel density ensuring that everything onscreen is super sharp.

Amazon has used a high-quality IPS panel, so viewing angles are excellent. Colours are rich and vibrant, while contrast was excellent. Our one minor complaint was that there’s a bit of backlight bleed around the side of the screen. This is only really noticeable on white backgrounds, with the edge having a faint-blue glow. It’s not enough to ruin enjoyment and most of the time you won’t even notice a problem.

It’s great for watching video and the rear-firing speakers are surprisingly loud and detailed, letting you happily watch content without having to plug in a pair of headphones.

AMAZON KINDLE FIRE HDX 7 PERFORMANCE

Amazon has significantly upgraded the internals, with a quad-core 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC and 2GB of RAM. This is a seriously fast chip, managing the Sunspider JavaScript test in just 560ms. This is one of the fastest scores that we’ve seen and puts the Kindle Fire HDX 7″ up there with top-of-the-range tablets from other manufacturers.

As well as decent performance in Android and web browsing, the Snapdragon 800 also has a dramatically improved graphics core. We ran the 3DMark Ice Storm benchmark, where the Standard and Extreme tests both maxed out, as the tablet was simply too powerful. Stepping up to the Unlimited test we saw a score of 16,398. This is one of the fastest scores that we’ve seen and shows that the Kindle Fire HDX 7″ can compete with the best of them.

AMAZON KINDLE FIRE HDX 7 FIRE OS

Although the Kindle technically runs Android, it’s a heavily customised and modified version, which Amazon calls Fire OS. The HDX 7″ runs the latest version, Fire OS 3.0 Mojito, which is based on Android 4.2.2. It’s quite neat in a lot of ways, with some nice touches. For example, as soon as you buy one, it turns up already linked to your Amazon account and credit card, so there’s very little you need to do in order to start using it.

Gone is any real indication that you’re running Android, with a completely new front end that’s hooked into Amazon’s services. The main screen is comprised of a carousel that shows you recently used documents, books, music, videos and apps. You can remove things from the carousel, but you can’t stop it automatically being populated. Underneath is a launcher for your apps.

For everything else you need to use categories, which run across the top of the screen. Each category is linked to the relevant Amazon service. Tap Videos, for example, and you can watch all of your Lovefilm content; Music pulls in all of the music from your Amazon Cloud player, where you can stream music or even download them to your tablet. Of course, Kindle books are tightly integrated, so you can read all of your purchases on your tablet.

We like the way that each category has two tabs. The cloud tab shows you everything you’ve purchased; the on device tab shows you what you’ve actually downloaded to the Kindle Fire HDX, or have copied via a USB cable. Then there are links to the relevant store, so you can pop on to Amazon and buy extra content.

Amazon’s added some neat features, too. X-ray is one of the best. In books it lets you find passages from a book related to the person, idea or topic you’re interested in. In films it integrates with IMDB, letting you get more information about the actors onscreen, including finding other movies they’re in that are available for you to stream. X-ray now has a Music mode for films, too, so you can see all of the tracks used in the production, buy them from Amazon or jump straight to the scene that they’re used in. For Fire OS 3.0, Amazon now has X-ray built into some music tracks. For enabled tracks, when you hit play you get lyrics onscreen. In terms of organisation with Amazon services, the Kindle Fire HDX is really rather clever. It gives you everything you want, neatly in one place.

X-ray is especially great for movie trivia fans, copy protection cuts out the movie when you screenshot it

New to this version is the Mayday button, which connects you to Amazon tech support over the internet. You get to see the person you’re talking to, but they can’t see you, just your device’s screen. They can highlight items on your screen, to help show you how to deal with a problem. Amazon hopes to answer all calls with 15 seconds and we certainly weren’t waiting long when we tried the service. We had to be put on hold a couple of times, while the advisor looked for an answer to our problems, but they were helpful and friendly. If you’re pretty techy, this feature probably won’t be much use, but if you’re not, it’ll be a godsend.

Get live help with onscreen prompting with the new Mayday feature

As a forked version of Android, you don’t get the same control as with a ‘pure’ Android tablet. Amazon installs some basic apps for email, contacts and your calendar, but you miss out on the stock Google defaults, such as Maps and Gmail. There’s also no Google Play store, with the Amazon App store replacing it. You’ll find most of the big names in there, including BBC iPlayer and Facebook, but it doesn’t have the breadth of Google’s own store and it doesn’t stock any Google Apps.

You can get round this problem by side-loading apps, provided you can find the relevant APK. It’s not overtly difficult if you know what you’re doing, but it’s a bit annoying that you can’t get everything through the Amazon store.

The Silk browser is a little harder to forgive, replacing Chrome. It doesn’t support any of Chrome’s synchronisation, so you can’t share tabs, usernames and passwords across multiple devices. It’s also more restrictive in Google, bringing up the basic mobile page, rather than the touch-designed tablet version of the search engine. It’s also not as smooth as Chrome, getting a little jerky at times, particularly when browsing complicated pages. It’s far from a disaster, but Chrome’s a better browser and if you can side load it, you should.

AMAZON KINDLE FIRE HDX 7 BATTERY LIFE

A 4,550mAh battery means there’s plenty of juice to use the tablet away from a power socket. In our video playback test, which we run at half screen brightness, we managed an impressive 11h 52m. That’s an entire long-haul flight’s worth of entertainment there.

AMAZON KIND FIRE HDX 7 CAMERA

There’s no rear camera on this model, only a front-facing camera, which you can use for video chats. It shoots 720p video and, while the quality won’t blow you away, is more than good enough for the job at hand. We’re not particularly bothered by the lack of a rear camera, as we rarely use a tablet for photography.

AMAZON KIND FIRE HDX 7 VERSIONS AND CONCLUSION

There’s no microSD card slot on this model, so you need to buy the version with the right amount of storage for you. The 16GB version costs £199, the 32GB version (recommended) costs £229 and the 64GB is a reasonable £259. If you want 4G as well as Wi-Fi, it’s an additional £70.

The default configuration comes ‘With Special Offers’, which means you’ll get ads for things on the lock screen. You can pay £10 when you buy to disable this feature, although you can pay to have this feature turned off at a later date, either by calling customer services or using the Mayday button. Our advice would be to see how you get on with the standard model, paying to turn it off if you find it too annoying.

There’s a lot to like about the Kindle Fire HDX 7″. It’s extremely well priced, too. Admittedly you lose out a few minor things (NFC and a rear camera, for example), but what’s there is extremely high quality. There’s even quite a lot to like about Fire OS, particularly if you buy everything through and use all of Amazon’s servers. For some, the Mayday button is a reason to buy alone.

That said, even though Amazon’s App Store has pretty much the same range of apps as the Google Play Store, there are some notable things missing. For most people, then, the Google Nexus 7 (2013) with its more open approach is the better buy.